by popular demand*

I'll try to post a few today.

Glad to hear someone called in against the Corsi creep, mire.

Greetings Blogafellows

Paul Waldman from Media Matters!

mmention cliff schecter?

waldman on now, he's from media matters

was on with Corsi on the Larry King show.

He did mention Schecter's book at that time.

I'll send a few more later.

About Corsi. The fact that mainstream media is parading this guy around is the problem. The right is always granted the the platform to spew lies. We should demand the same amount of time for Cliff Schecter. But we know they won't. Because Schecter is telling the truth.

Southern school district to let overly
frightened teachers carry guns

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A school district will let teachers bring guns to class this fall, the district's superintendent said on Friday, in what experts said appeared to be a first in the United States.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080815/ts_nm/texas_guns_dc;_ylt=AhqnPKbzc0a...

McCain and his mother don't recall old lawsuits against his ex-wife

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Republican presidential candidate John McCain's divorce was amicable enough that he and his ex-wife jointly brought a lawsuit 10 years later to recover damages for lost mementos, but it wasn't amicable enough to prevent McCain's mother from suing his ex-wife to get back some personal property.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080816/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_old_lawsuits;_ylt...

Airlines push for
homegrown jet fuel

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the price of oil still above $100 a barrel, everything from wood chips to chicken fat is being scrutinized as an alternative to traditional fuel. But when it comes to airplanes, finding the right mix poses a special challenge.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/airlines_alternative_fuels;_ylt=Aq5DnCDC2AvcB...

Alabama county faces biggest
US municipal bankruptcy

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Alabama's largest county appears headed for the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, a $3.2 billion mess created by the nation's credit crunch and a colossal, corruption-riddled sewer project.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/alabama_county_bankruptcy;_ylt=AofUv1tczfH9Kv...

beautiful, still and cool here this morning.

will be at the Chicago Air and Water Show today. He will arrive by parachute, jumping from an airplane.

Just heard on Local news.

<font size="1">insert text here</font>

you can modify the size by increasing the number as a whole number.

<font size="1" color="blue">insert text here</font>

this would change the color of the the text to blue

<font size="1" spellcheck="on">insert text here</font>
In mmrules dreams ;-)
___
bluerootsradio

Breaking up big banks an
option as losses mount

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
America's biggest banks have suffered unprecedented losses from the ongoing credit crisis, and that's made some investors question whether the big financial conglomerates should be broken up in order to survive.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080816/ap_on_bi_ge/wall___main;_ylt=At5rY7V...

Bring back the DC-3

;-)

___
bluerootsradio

http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=3

Ukraine considers sharing missile defense
Posted: 04:38 AM ET
(CNN) — Ukraine is interested in joining European and other nations in a joint missile defense system, according to a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian foreign ministry. The spokeswoman, Liubov Abravitova, would not specify if this included the United States which has recently signed missile defense agreements with the Czech Republic and Poland.

Word of the former Soviet republic’s willingness to find partners to share a missile defense comes two days after Poland and the United States signed a preliminary deal to place part of a U.S. ballistic missile defense system in Poland, a plan that has drawn sharp objections from Russia. Poland’s interceptor rockets would be linked to an air-defense radar system in the Czech Republic.

Ukraine and Georgia’s applications to join NATO were tabled last April in the face of stiff opposition from Russia which is concerned that the alliance’s eastward march will erode its influence in those countries.

http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/16/ukraine-considers-sharing-missil...

in August even. Odd.

thing? Just a nerdy question.

It has been very hot here...over 100. Today we will go to an afternoon movie...Tropic Thunder so we can get home in time to watch the Warren thing. Tomorrow we are supposed to get thunderstorms.

Happe Talk

.

Obama Moves in the Right Direction on Taxes
By Lawrence Kudlow

Lo and behold, Team Obama is moving toward the supply-side and pivoting toward the political center on key aspects of its tax policy. Writing in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Obama advisors Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee outlined a plan that would only raise tax rates on capital-gains and dividends from 15 percent to 20 percent for individuals making more than $200,000 and on family incomes above $250,000. Prior to this, investors worried that Obama would double the 15 percent tax rate on cap-gains and bring the 15 percent rate on dividends back to 40 percent.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/obama_moves_in_the_rig...

we have the technology.

. Corsi doesn't just belong to the right's conspiratorial wing, he belongs to its racist, white-supremacist fringe. Over the last couple of years, he's written disparagingly about Muslims, Catholics and Jews, not to mention gays and lesbians. Muslims are "ragheads," the pope is "senile" and tolerates "boy bumping," and Jews ... well, you can imagine. Corsi looked beleaguered but respectable this week when he appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live," but it would be far more instructive if his prospective readers could hear him Sunday, when he's scheduled to appear on "The Political Cesspool," a "pro-white" radio program that endorses the so-called neo-Confederate movement's belief that secession is the right of every American state, promotes the notion that "the United States is a Christian nation" and "opposes all efforts to mix the races of mankind."

That brings us to one of the primary differences between that bitterly contested election of 1796 and this one. In former years, Americans' ideology was influenced by their participation in the economy. To put it crudely, businesspeople tended to find a home in the Republican Party, working men and women in the Democratic Party. Today, we have a new class, one to which Corsi and his ilk belong, whose business is their ideology.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten16-2008aug16,0,472577.co...

that thing looks like a gas guzzler Nando

Happe Talk

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess.

Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.

The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback.

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Mr. Putin is, in this sense of grievance, a man of his people, as visitors to the New York Times Web site can see in the sampling of breast-beating commentary from Russian bloggers. It is safe to assume that Mr. Putin’s already stratospheric popularity at home has grown to Phelpsian proportions, not least among the long-suffering military.

In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face.

The protesters on the Chinese pavilion held banners welcoming Mr. Gorbachev as a champion of the greater freedom they sought. Meanwhile, the visiting Russian delegation marveled at the abundance in Chinese stores, the bounty of a policy that chose economic liberalization without political dissent.

The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.

President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neoconservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. For a president who has made the export of democracy his signature doctrine, that looked to the stand-tough crowd like a “Pet Goat” moment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/weekinreview/17keller.html?_r=1&hp&ore...

Happe Talk

The GlobalFlyer is a single seat, turbofan powered airplane designed to fly around the world nonstop, unrefueled. It achieved this milestone for the first time on March 03, 2005 after 67 hours and one minute of flying time. With that, Pilot Steve Fossett set the record for fastest time around the world unrefueled. The GlobalFlyer took off and landed in Salina, Kansas.

Scaled Composites will be making vehicles for the Spaceport.

How Anti-Intellectualism Is Destroying America

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted August 15, 2008.

Sad but true: Intelligence is a political liability in the US. Author of The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby explains why.

"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." Barack Obama finally said it.

Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right's stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them -- and us -- unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.

American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes "the jury is still out" on evolution.

Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually list the commandments.

This stuff would be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

More here:

http://www.alternet.org/story/95109/

this more than anything baffles me. There must be something terribly wrong with the human ego that it would distain just what is necessary for good leadership. I have mentioned before that I had a client who voted for Bush because she felt sorry for him.

So nobody can be better than me. I am an idiot. I will vote for McCain.

Happe Talk

Beautiful morning here in Chicago area.
Hope everyone is well today..

Why is Obama moving so far to the right???

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/10/automobiles/W54HV_BU006.j...

Rocket Racing League. It captures the imagination.

U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules

By Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 16, 2008; Page A01

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

"If police officers no longer see themselves as engaged in protecting their communities from criminals and instead as domestic intelligence agents working on behalf of the CIA, they will be encouraged to collect more information," German said. "It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/15/AR200808...

Tails-- McFeeble steals the election:

Did Washington waste millions on faulty voting machines?

Meantime, computer scientists at several universities, some of whom had been hired to test voting machines for the states of California, Ohio, Connecticut and New York, reported finding security and performance flaws in virtually every system, spurring the push for a paper audit trail.

That includes most voters in states such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana and Virginia, said Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit group Voter Action, who called the machines "scandalously flawed . . . untrustworthy.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/election2008/story/48508.html

Former congressman Bob Ney of Ohio has been released from a halfway house in Cincinnati after serving a sentence in connection with a public corruption scandal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7730099

ns!

backatcha Sandy!

That's change we can believe in? I like it but not sure it will pass the sniff test.

Extra help available to McShame

Liberal talk radio hires ex-con Ney

As someone pointed out here recently, Ratner is a frequent (daily?) guest on the Hartmann show.

article did not really cover it.

Happe Talk

Just put down the shovel, finished burying one of the house cats, Gizmo out in the desert, she was 16 yrs. old. Did Powa 1st, and as I was digging the hole a tow plane released a glider, (sail/soar plane) right over my head, I saw the tow rope go and said Phat! Tibetan, (loosely translated) for letting go.

No way; didn't he cave after just 12 hours after last election? Why didn't have an aggressive legal team calling for a recount in Ohio? He needed Ken Blackwells head on a platter and instead served up a cup of his own tears.

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

"The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
"The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

~~~ H. L. Mencken (Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920)
________

The Rise and (realtive) Fall of Stupidity in America by Tom Tomorrow
________

The Power Of Stupidity by Giancarlo Livraghi
________

Know-Nothing Politics by Paul Krugman (Published: August 7, 2008)
________

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former."

~~~ Albert Einstein
________

Inspired by toniD's post on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 10:39am

cut and pasted and saved to my geeky folder for when i'll need it

The Association: along comes Mary....what memories. I went to the Renaissance Pleasure faire when I was 15 (1965) and sold kisses in a booth. Terry of the Association bought one. I thought I was hot shit!!

Happe Talk

so we are invisible.

can you imagine a myla vs molly show? i was just thinking what if seder takes myla to seattle and malloy brings molly and the two girls get to meet, wouldn't that be a hoot and what it would be like to listen to their conversation fly on the wall style....i know i know, child exploitation and all that.....but that would be something, or not.....

finally ready for it, found the perfect time, cool and stormy outside, i am finally gonna watch a bad situationist today

well, that explains a lot. Thanks Cat Chew.

Bush protesters get $50,000 state settlement

DES MOINES, Iowa - State records show that a $50,000 judgment has been awarded to two retired school teachers who were strip-searched during a 2004 campaign stop by President Bush.

The State Appeal Board recently approved the out-of-court settlement for Alice McCabe and Christine Nelson.

They brought a claim against the Iowa Department of Public Safety after two state troopers arrested them at a rally in Cedar Rapids in September 2004. The charges were later dropped.

In June, a federal jury awarded the women $750,000 on their claim that their constitutional rights were violated.

Authorities have said the women were arrested because they refused to obey reasonable security restrictions at the rally, but the women claimed they were taken into custody because they had a dissenting opinion from the Bush administration. McCabe and Nelson argued successfully that their constitutional rights to free speech, assembly and freedom from unreasonable arrest and search were violated during the 2004 incident.

The settlement payout was included in a State Appeal Board preliminary report that detailed more than $9.1 million in settlements and judgments the panel approved during fiscal 2008.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Bush_protesters_get_50000_state_settlement...

The way around is to use code to create the carets. The code for left caret is

& l t ;

(you have to remove the spaces between the 4 characteres) and the code for right is

& g t ;

(again remove the spaces between the characters).

When you use the code the html interpreter is fooled.

This stoopid computer trick brought to you by GlobalFlyer Inc!

___
bluerootsradio

anti intellectualism
Submitted by mhappenow on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 10:54am.
this more than anything baffles me. There must be something terribly wrong with the human ego that it would distain just what is necessary for good leadership...
------
Anti-intellectualism doesn't surprise me. I first noticed its existence when my family moved from the city to the country when I was a kid.

Imagine a resentful short person who spends an inordinate amount of time touting the advantages of being short versus the disadvantages of not being short and you will have a pretty good idea of the mindset of anti-intellectuals.

An argument that I frequently encounter is "Being smart does not necessarily make for good leadership." I have responded to this statement so often, I have the counter-argument memorized: "Not being smart guarantees incompetent leadership."

Most of the idiots who argue against intellectualism are actually arguing against elitism while arguing for personality (he's the kinda guy you'd like to share a beer with) and they cannot accurately define the word "competence," so my counter-argument is wasted on them.

competence

1.)
a.) The state or quality of being adequately or well qualified; ability.

Being smart, i.e. sufficiently competent to assimilate and deliberate the huge amount of information encountered by any leader, does not guarantee good leadership but it is a much better starting point than being incapable of processing a constant flood of information, thereby guaranteeing poor leadership (or guaranteeing that a shadow figure behind the scenes is the de facto leader).

Humans are born with varying intellectual capabilities. It isn't fair (take it up with the god of your choice). Humans are born with varying degrees of coordination and varying degrees of good health, etc.

The biggest losers are the people who stop trying to educate themselves, who stop trying to improve their coordination and who stop trying to work around their health problems.

They are the same losers who resent anyone who scores higher than they do.

Did anybody here go?

your brilliance should be spread out into the airwaves. If you are shy, I will read it for you or mb will I am sure.

Happe Talk

Gizmo's gone
new
Submitted by gbasin on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 12:56pm.
=

: )

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

Democrats to offer bill with offshore oil drilling

By Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Saturday when the U.S. Congress returns next month from its summer recess, Democrats will offer legislation that could give oil companies drilling access to more offshore areas.

By moving to open additional federal waters to energy exploration, Democrats could narrow the differences they have with Republicans on tackling America's energy problems, a concern that ranks high with voters heading into the November presidential and congressional elections.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has changed his position and said he would be willing to consider new offshore drilling if it allowed comprehensive energy legislation to pass. His Republican challenger, John McCain, also switched his position and has called for opening most U.S. waters to drilling if the affected states agree.

In the Democrats' weekly radio address, Pelosi of California said expanding drilling areas would be part of a broader bill which addresses other energy issues.

"It will consider opening portions of the (offshore) Outer Continental Shelf for drilling, with appropriate safeguards, and without taxpayer subsidies to Big Oil," she said.

Pelosi said the legislation would require oil companies to pay billions of dollars in drilling royalties, which would be invested in clean energy resources.

Democrats also want to release supplies from the U.S. emergency oil stockpile to help lower gasoline prices, increase drilling in an Alaskan oil reserve that is already open to exploration and require utilities to generate a portion of their electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind energy.

In addition, Pelosi said, the legislation would seek to rein in excessive energy market speculation that many U.S. lawmakers blame for running up crude oil and gasoline prices.

"This comprehensive Democratic approach will ensure energy independence which is essential to our national security, will create millions of good paying jobs here at home in a new green economy, and will take major steps forward in addressing the global climate crisis," Pelosi said.

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said the Democratic proposal falls short of Republican-sponsored legislation that would open more areas to oil drilling, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

"While the speaker now claims to embrace a comprehensive energy plan that includes more conservation, more innovation, and more American energy production, the fact is her new effort appears to be just another flawed plan that will do little to lower gas prices," Boehner said.

He said if Pelosi was serious about boosting domestic oil supplies, she would call the House back into session to take up such a bill. Congress is scheduled to return on September 8.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Democrats_to_offer_bill_with_offshore_0816...

I wanna submit something.

US must share power in new world order, says Turkey's controversial president

In his first interview with a foreign newspaper since becoming head of state, Abdullah Gül tells Stephen Kinzer of his vision for his country as a bridge between nations

Days after Russia scored a stunning geopolitical victory in the Caucasus, President Abdullah Gül of Turkey said he saw a new multipolar world emerging from the wreckage of war.

The conflict in Georgia, Gül asserted, showed that the United States could no longer shape global politics on its own, and should begin sharing power with other countries.

"I don't think you can control all the world from one centre," Gül told the Guardian. "There are big nations. There are huge populations. There is unbelievable economic development in some parts of the world. So what we have to do is, instead of unilateral actions, act all together, make common decisions and have consultations with the world. A new world order, if I can say it, should emerge."

Gül, relaxing in a hotel suite with a spectacular view of the glistening Bosphorus, spoke just hours before meeting with the visiting president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

He rejected the idea, promoted by the United States and Israel, that the best way to deal with Iran was to isolate, sanction and punish it. "There are so many important issues, like the nuclear issue, Iraq, the Caucasus, Afghanistan," he said. "Iran is definitely having some influence of these issues, so we are talking."

Gül said Iran had a right to develop nuclear energy but not nuclear weapons. "We don't want to see weapons of mass destruction in this region," he said. "If it's in our neighbourhood, we definitely don't want to see it."

Asked about the possibility of an American attack on Iran, Gül replied: "I don't want to think about that. Everybody should take a lesson from what happened in Iraq," he said. "Diplomatic solutions are always better than hard solutions."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/16/turkey.usforeignpolicy

Nando, I never fart and when I do they don't stink!

Happe Talk

I'm not sayin...I'm just sayin

Unless you have an activated carbon biscuit up your bum.

Happe Talk

Roberta McCain denies lawsuit against son's ex-wife

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — Republican presidential candidate John McCain's divorce was amicable enough that he and his ex-wife jointly brought a lawsuit 10 years later to recover damages for lost mementos, but it wasn't amicable enough to prevent McCain's mother from suing his ex-wife to get back some personal property.

Both lawsuits were settled out of court decades ago and before they went to trial, but records of them are kept in the archives of the city courthouse in Alexandria.

Curiously, although the records clearly list the plaintiffs, McCain's campaign says that the Arizona senator didn't know about or authorize the 1990 lawsuit with his ex-wife, Carol, and that his mother's 1980 lawsuit was filed "unintentionally." And McCain's 96-year-old mother, Roberta, says she never sued Carol.

But others involved dispute those assertions.

In the 1980 lawsuit, filed shortly after John and Carol McCain divorced, Roberta sued Carol to reclaim some personal property,including paintings, a needlepoint screen and a pair of earrings. A
settlement was reached in 1981.

But in a brief telephone interview, Roberta denied filing the lawsuit.

"I have never heard of what you're talking about. … I will put my hand on a Bible," she said, to attest that she had never sued Carol.

Roberta's denial prompted laughter from the ex-daughter-in-law.

"Yes, she sued me," Carol said in a brief phone interview.

Roberta's lawsuit sought personal property she claimed Carol was refusing to return. The disputed items included an "18th century Burmise Buddist Preist (Burmese Buddhist priest)" valued by Roberta at $2,000, and a "Butlers Tray for Liquor" she valued at $225.

McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said in an e-mail, "Of course, by all accounts the divorce was completely amicable. After John and Carol McCain's divorce, there was apparently some confusion about belongings that were Roberta McCain's but we understand the court papers were unintentionally filed, and the matter never went further in the legal system. It went nowhere, and was of no consequence."

In the 1990 lawsuit, John and Carol McCain jointly sought $1 million in punitive damages after a property management firm mistakenly threw out some McCain family treasures from a garage the
McCains shared with an adjacent townhouse. The lost items included letters McCain wrote to his wife as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

In his e-mail, Bounds said McCain "had no knowledge of the suit: He did not authorize the suit or participate in its filing."

But the lawyer who represented the McCains said she did indeed speak to McCain and get his permission to sue on his behalf.

"You can be sure that I talked to and got the permission of any client who is listed as a plaintiff," said attorney Barbara P. Beach.

It would be a serious violation to file an unauthorized lawsuit, and "I haven't been disbarred yet," Beach said with a laugh.

Beach said she's not surprised, though, that McCain doesn't remember the case. She recalled that Carol was much more deeply involved.

"I don't think it took more than 15 minutes of his time," Beach said. "The fact that they don't remember it doesn't bother me."

More here:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/16/roberta-mccain-denies-la...

hahahahahahahahahah
new
Submitted by mhappenow on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 1:36pm.

Nando, I never fart and when I do they don't stink!

re: mb how do you post that html code with out it doing its
Submitted by maggiesboy on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 12:58pm.
The way around is to use code to create the carets...
--------
I have been trying to research the use of the term "caret" used instead of "inequality."

A caret (in written language) points upward. It is also known as a circumflex accent.

The horizontal arrows denote inequality in mathematics. I have never found a proper noun for the symbols that stand for inequality or "greater than" or "less than."

Neither have I found a definitive source claiming that the proper noun for ASCII carets (horizontal arrows) is "caret."

I have seen plenty of anecdotal examples, like maggiesboy's, where the horizontal carets used in ASCII are called carets or arrows (interchangeably).

Can anyone point me (that's an arrow joke) to a website that positively states the proper name for the horizontal arrows used in ASCII?

File this under "Stuff that Bait wants to know for no particular reason."

If you would like to see the confusion over the many different proper names applied to some symbols, look at "@" @ http://www.answers.com/%40

(I'm partial to @ being known as "strudel" or "snail" but that's just me.)

U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules
More Federal Intelligence Changes Planned

By Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 16, 2008; A01

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

Supporters say the measures simply codify existing counterterrorism practices and policies that are endorsed by lawmakers and independent experts such as the 9/11 Commission. They say the measures preserve civil liberties and are subject to internal oversight.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/15/AR200808...

if my walls are mute, you are safe.

My friend Taylor has tested and tested them.

I should probably repaint the downstairs bathroom.

the noise he refers to are his snores.

Happe Talk

Bill O’Reilly goes Hollywood.
“An American Carol” — a new movie which opens Oct. 3 — is directed by David Zucker and features a cameo by Bill O’Reilly. The film, according to O’Reilly is “a spoof of the far left, focusing on Michael Moore, played by Kevin Farley — the late Chris Farley’s brother.” Pandagon notes that O’Reilly previewed the trailer on his show this week. The movie includes a scene in which O’Reilly follows the fictional Moore into a bathroom stall and slaps him. Watch it: at link

Jesse Taylor writes, “You know what’s less funny than this? Live streaming footage of murder. You know what’s more funny than this? Everything else.” (HT: Atrios)

Update
In his book Culture Warrior, O'Reilly asserts, "Of course, Hollywood also trumpets the S-P [secular-progressive] agenda. So traditionalists are really up against it in the media -- with two huge exceptions: talk radio and Fox News." (p. 59)

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/08/16/bill-oreilly-goes-hollywood/

dunno if this helps...
http://members.aol.com/jeff570/relation.html

scroll down to "Artis Analyticae Praxis ad Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas"

Obama Crushes McCain in July Fundraising
Sen. Barack Obama raised more than $51 million in July, the AP reports. His campaign began August with $65.8 million on hand and has had more than 2 million donors.

In contrast, Sen. John McCain raised $27 million in July and had just $21.4 million in cash on hand. He has had approximately 600,000 donors.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080816/D92JFMGG3.html

Submitted by 60th Street on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 1:51pm.
dunno if this helps...
------
It (barely) supports the claim that > and < are not called carets.

Affiliations of Cable News Watchers

The latest Pew Research survey on the partisan make up cable news network viewership:

CNN: 51% Democrats, 18% Republicans, 23% independents

MSNBC: 45% Democrats, 18% Republicans, 27% independents

Fox News: 33% Democrats, 39% Republicans, 22% independents

http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/444.pdf

carrot worth writing about.

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
June 30, 2008

Executive Order: Reforming Processes Related to Suitability for Government Employment, Fitness for Contractor Employees, and Eligibility for Access to Classified National Security Information

(g) "Covered individual" means a person who performs work for or on behalf of the executive branch, or who seeks to perform work for or on behalf of the executive branch, but does not include:

(i) the President or (except to the extent otherwise directed by the President) employees of the President under section 105 or 107 of title 3, United States Code; or

(ii) the Vice President or (except to the extent otherwise directed by the Vice President) employees of the Vice President under section 106 of title 3 or annual legislative branch appropriations acts.
...

(v) ensure that actions taken under this order are consistent with the President's constitutional authority to:

(A) conduct the foreign affairs of the United States;

(B) withhold information the disclosure of which could impair the foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties;

(C) recommend for congressional consideration such measures as the President may judge necessary or expedient; and

(D) supervise the unitary executive branch.

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

Jon Stewart: I’ve got as much authority as McCain in the Georgia situation.
By: SilentPatriot @ 6:00 PM - PDT

Jon Stewart mocks President Bush’s lack of short-term memory about when it’s OK to invade other countries, as well as McCain’s presumptuousness for dispatching “Droopy-Dog and Howdy Doody” (Lieberman and Graham) to Georgia, despite his status as candidate for President.

Download | Play Download | Play go to link for video

Do you guys have any short term memory? Do you have anything? You just said, yeah let’s be clear about it, you can’t just overthrow a government, occupy a capital, knock over their statues, stack their prisoners, refer to the, refer to the horrific level of civilian casualties as birth pangs of democracy. Of course obviously this situation isn’t just the dangerous escalation of once mordent cold war hostilities. It’s a chance for our Presidential nominees to get inside the Commander in Chief simulator, and play a little make believe.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/08/15/jon-stewart-ive-got-as-much-aut...

Red State Update

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM8yHb19jhQ

Jim Gilchrist shows us what being a "minuteman" is really all about...

If you believe I have the authority to do this...
and
The next president will be so filled with power at all that Dick and I have given him that
he will be hard pressed to change a thing.
hehehehehehehe

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
July 31, 2008
Executive Order: Further Amendments to Executive Order 12333, United States Intelligence Activities

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-458), and in order to update and clarify Executive Order 13355 of August 27, 2004, Executive Order 12333 of December 4, 1981, as amended, is hereby further amended as follows:
==
re
U.S. May Ease Police Spy
Submitted by toniD on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 1:43pm.

U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules
More Federal Intelligence Changes Planned

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

This is a true story.

---

Charlie McCarty was the attorney general of Arizona in the '50s.

My friend & his best friend both came over to my house an hour ago.

His best friend's name is Charles McCarty.
He is Charlie McCarty's son.
Charlie McCarty is deceased.

Charles is also the son-in-law of Tim Bee, the politician currently running for Congress as a Republican,...trying to beat Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who is the representative of my district.

Charles McCarty just gave me the details about his "abducted" daughter.

His daughter, Mary Rose McCarty, was taken away from him and his wife about two years ago by Tim Bee and his wife, Grace.

Grace's twin sister, Joy, is married to Charles McCarty.

Joy was living in a house owned by Grace.
And, then she married Charles McCarty.

Grace kicked Joy and her family out of her house.
She didn't like Charlie.

Charles and Joy have a daughter named Mary Rose McCarty.

Her name has been changed to Analise now.
And, Tim Bee and Grace claim she is their daughter.

How could this happen?

According to Charles, they "coveted" Mary Rose since she was born. (whatever that means)

(This prompted me to tell Charles to at least rest assured that the child is not most likely in physical danger, since Grace and Tim Bee were always fond of Mary Rose (Analise). Charles then acknowledged that technically that is a tiny positive viewpoint on an awful situation.)

Let me continue with the story.

When Joy and Charles had brief marital problems (which are and have been resolved a long time ago), Child Protective Services confiscated their young daughter and "gave" it to Grace and Tim Bee.

There was no adoption process, no foster care process, etc... Just strings pulled at the highest levels by Grace and Tim Bee.

The baby was just taken away and given to Grace and Tim Bee. They literally claim Analise is their daughter. (she is the little girl on his shoulders in the political campaign commercials)

Joy and Charles have been trying for the last two years to get their daughter, Mary Rose (Analise), back from Grace and Tim Bee,...to no avail.

They are psychically exhausted.
And having trouble seeing how they will ever get their daughter back.

---

How can a politician get away with this?

How can Tim Be have the audacity to run for Congress?

---

Besides thinking optimistically, how can Charles and Joy McCarty get their daughter back?

Kind citizens of Sederville... Any ideas?

I hope everyone is well.

------

NOTE: This a true story.

Charles just left my house and I told him his dilemma would be resolved really soon.

Please help. And, also tell me what I can do.

Thank you.

I'll check back later.

Sir Real

P.S. If interested in doing investigative reporting...Sam, or Sederites,... I can get you Charles McCarty's phone number.

How Republicans Play on Racial and Religious Bigotry (Brent Budowsky)
@ 9:58 am
In his post on The Hill's Pundits Blog this morning, a former aide to the House Republican leadership, John Feehery, wrote this: "To sum up where Democrats are coming from,” Feehery wrote: "you are a Democrat if you are not white or Christian.”

As a white, a Christian and a Democrat who was an early supporter of Barack Obama, I object to this, in the strongest possible terms, as a matter of personal privilege and personal honor.

Having worked for the House Democratic leadership, I object just as vehemently when this road in the mud is taken by a Democrat.

Not long ago we learned that Mark Penn, the decade-long chief strategist for Bill and Hillary Clinton, pushed a campaign to attack Barack Obama's American roots.

In Penn's world, even if you were born in Hawaii, you lack American roots. In Penn's world, it’s say anything, do anything, divide anyone to win.

John Feehery, a senior Republican strategist, now stoops to attacking Democrats for allegedly not wanting whites or Christians to be in the Democratic Party. In Feehery's world, it’s say anything, do anything, divide anyone to win.

This is the kind of garbage that has no place in American politics, no place in American civic discourse, no place in our national political life.

This kind of garbage now permeates the presidential campaign of John McCain, who says he is proud of his ads that link a black man with young, white, blond women and proud of his campaign that refers to his opponent as "the messiah" and "the one" and who lacks the moral courage and decency to condemn a book of lies by a man who called Pope John Paul II senile and called Hillary Clinton a "lesbo.”

This line of political attack is what has gone terribly and horribly wrong in American political life. This line of political attack is what the overwhelming majority of voters want ended.

It was an outrage when Mark Penn did it. It is an outrage when John Feehery does it.

The man who used to be John McCain once deplored this low road of politics.

The man who is John McCain depends on it.

Elect John McCain, we get four more years of this.

http://pundits.thehill.com/2008/08/16/how-republicans-play-on-racial-and...

Sorry to spring this on you all. (Please read.) re: Tim Bee
new
Submitted by Sir Real on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 2:29pm.

This is a true story.

==

Possession is nine 10ths of the law.

Not to go into to much detail.

you get my drift?

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

Protests: Chicago Style:

Iraq War Protest - March 21st 2003 - Chicago 3:56
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEFd1YYpRlU

-----
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBQgcGIUe4&feature=related

MArch 18, 2006 7:49
-----
Oct 5, 2006 WCW Chicago 1:36

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGxlRyvBqiE
-----
March 20, 2007 Chicago 10:56

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_xvx6FmoBA
-----

The FCC Comes to Chicago
Public Hearing: 9/20/2007
6 Minute video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQEnqh9x1dM&NR=1

<><><><><><><>
<><><><><><><>
<><><><><><><>
<><><><><><><>
<><><><><><><>
___
bluerootsradio
fookin' intellectual grammarical nazis! ;-)

DNC Out-Raises RNC For First Time This Cycle
The Democratic National Committee has announced that they raised $27.7 million for the month of July, just edging out the RNC's $26 million, the first time this whole cycle that the usually-underfunded DNC has outdone the RNC. The DNC, including its joint committee with the Obama campaign, has $28.5 million cash on hand, bringing the Democratic total with the Obama campaign to $94.3 million -- just narrowly behind the Republicans' aggregate total of over $100 million on hand.

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/08/election_central...

This is Bob. Think you could gimme a call?

Need some Life advice eh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2008_lunar_eclipse
The partial eclipse will be completely visible from Africa and Europe. Parts of Australia will see it begin before sunrise, while parts of South America will see it end just after sunset.

The penumbral eclipse will begin at 18:23 UTC, with the partial eclipse beginning at 19:36. The time of greatest eclipse is 21:10. The partial eclipse will end at 22:44, and the penumbral eclipse will finally at 23:57.

The planet Neptune will be 2 days past opposition, visible in binoculars as an 8th magnitude "star" just two degrees west and slightly south of the moon.

if you were on the moon - this is what you'd see

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

Loretta Sanchez: Half Of House Dems Could Vote For Hillary At Convention
In an indication that the Democratic Convention could unintentionally give an appearance of Democratic disunity, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez of California is predicting that up to half of the House Dems could end up voting for Hillary Clinton under an open roll call. "I felt she was the most experienced and the best candidate and I still feel that way," Sanchez added -- though for the record, it should be noted that Hillary herself has said she personally plans on voting for Obama.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12565.html

McCain: Western State Water Compact Should Be Reopened
John McCain may have just gotten in trouble in the key swing state of Colorado, telling The Pueblo Chieftain that the 1922 water compact among Western states should be renegotiated. Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar responded by saying Mccain's position is "absolutely wrong and would only happen over my dead body," and that Colorado should fear losing more its water resources if negotiations are opened up again.

http://www.chieftain.com/articles/2008/08/15/news/local/doc48a548fed1e6f...

McCain still considering flip-flop on Alaska Refuge drilling.
Jonathan Martin notes that John McCain “isn’t totally closing the door on dropping his opposition to drilling in ANWR.” In an interview with the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, McCain said he continues to examine whether to endorse drilling in the Alaska Refuge. McCain earlier said he’s “more than happy” to consider flip-flopping on Alaskan oil drilling, but then quickly back-tracked, reiterating his position that the Refuge “is a pristine place and if they found oil in the Grand Canyon, I don’t think I’d drill in the Grand Canyon.”

http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0808/McCain_still_mulling_A...

Lawsuit filed against Gonzales, DOJ officials.
Yesterday, six attorneys “rejected from civil service positions at the Justice Department filed a lawsuit” against “former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and three other top officials for allegedly violating their rights by taking politics into consideration” in the hiring process for the Honors and Summer Law Intern Programs. The complaint states that the Gonzales’s Justice Department oversaw the “gross deprivation of hundreds of individuals’ constitutional rights” in “an extraordinary, and uniquely successful, conspiracy to achieve political results.”

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5587585

Lawsuit filed against
Submitted by toniD on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 3:30pm.

Lawsuit filed against Gonzales, DOJ officials.
=
contrary to what the head compromised lawyer of the USA says

somebody thinks a law was broken.

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

Seriously.

ayahuasca
http://www.jcrows.com/ayahuasca.html

Pronounced "ah-yah-waska," the word is from the Quechua language; it means "vine of the soul," "vine of the dead," or "the vision vine." Known by various names among 72 native ayahuasca-ingesting cultures in Peru, Columbia, and Ecuador, this legendary, industrial-strength hallucinogen is used by curanderos, or witch doctors, to heal the sick and communicate with spirits. Many rainforest shamans simply refer to ayahuasca as el remedio, "the remedy."

Revered by indigenous people as a sacred medicine, a master cure for all diseases, it is without a doubt the most celebrated hallucinogenic plant concoction of the Amazon.

Who owns yage?

In recent years, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry seems to have developed a rather unhealthy interest in ayahuasca. Loren Miller of the International Plant Medicine Corporation tried to obtain a patent for Banisteriopsis caapi, which would have given her exclusive rights to create and sell new varieties for profit. Miller had pulled out a yage plant from the garden of an Ecuadorian family without asking permission, hurried back to the United States with the vine, and then applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Upon learning what had transpired, the Ecuador-based Coordinating Committee of Native Organizations of the Amazon Basin denounced Miller and her company as "enemies of the native peoples" and proclaimed they were unwelcome in indigenous territories. Because of this scandal, the Ecuadorian government refused to sign a bilateral agreement on intellectual property rights with the United States in 1996, which would have made U.S. patent law applicable in Ecuador. Washington countered by threatening Ecuador with economic sanctions.

Miller's patent application was eventually rejected by the U.S. government. But if her company manages to produce a synthetic version of yage, then a patent could be granted. Thus far, the U.S. Senate has refused to ratify the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity that recognizes the property rights of native people. More than 100 countries have signed this treaty, including Ecuador.

While U.S. corporations seek to plunder the natural treasures of the Amazon, the destruction of the rainforest continues at an accelerated pace. "I feel a great sorrow when trees are burned, when the forest is destroyed," Pablo Cesar Amaringo, a Peruvian painter, explained. "I feel sorrow because I know that human beings are doing something very wrong. When one takes ayahuasca, one can sometimes hear how the trees cry when they are going to be cut down. They know beforehand, and they cry. And the spirits have to go to other places, because their physical part, their house, is destroyed."

http://singingtotheplants.blogspot.com/2008/01/ayahuasca-patent-case.htm...
jan 2008

Ironically, after all his legal efforts, Miller was left with a patent that was virtually valueless. The patent he received protected only the specific genome of the patented plant and its asexually reproduced progeny — that is, exclusive rights over nothing more than his original plant and specimens grown from its cuttings. It did not give him rights over any other specimens of the ayahuasca vine, even specimens that might be identical in appearance.

Under the law, a patent applied for before 1995 expires seventeen years from the date it was originally issued. The ayahuasca patent expired on June 17, 2003. It cannot be renewed.

=

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

[Runs screaming from blogroom.]

SO YOU THINK YOU HAVE A CLINTON INFESTATION...

Does your party have a Clinton problem? A Clinton infestation should not be taken lightly. Left to their own devices, Clintons can be quite destructive to a party. If not properly contained, they can drain all the resources out of a party for their own use. This can lead to dangerous drops in party registration and, in extreme cases, the loss of one or even both houses of Congress.
What is a Clinton?

A Clinton (Dickyoptra Priapteris Parasitis Clintonis) is a particularly virulent form of political animal. Clintons gain access to a political party by professing loyalty to the party's principles and claiming to act on behalf of the party's most vulnerable and needy members. Once inside the party, however, Clintons will subvert the party's goals and use the trust placed in them for their own benefit.

It is a common perception that Clintons are indestructible and would be the only creatures able to survive a nuclear war. This is true.
How to identify a Clinton:

A Clinton is characterized by

* grandiosity
* an insatiable need for public attention
* love of private air travel
* willingness to race bait
* willingness to hang out with Ron Burkle
* hypersensitivity
* anger
* entitlement
* self-pity
* Mark Penn

Habitat:

The native habitat of Clintons is Arkansas, where they were first discovered in the 1980s. In the '90s, they spread as far as Washington D.C., Southern California and Martha's Vineyard. Since then their habitat has grown to include the entire world.
Risk factors for a Clinton infestation:

* You have a private plane.
* You own a vacation home in Martha's Vineyard, East Hampton, or Malibu.
* You are holding a television camera.
* You are a celebrity.
* You are a billionaire.
* You know a celebrity or a billionaire.
* You are Bono.
* You have the ability to give unceasing approval.
* You are a political party that enables Clintons to access any of the above.

Signs you have a Clinton infestation:

* You're running for president against a craven, dithering, 71-year-old stooge who wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years and start another war with Iran, and you still can't get above 47 percent in the polls.

* Your convention is teetering on the edge of chaos because your former opponent refuses to stop tacitly encouraging a small pocket of lunatic, racist dead-enders.

* One of which, Geraldine Ferraro, is being quoted in the press.

* You won the nomination, but through the press you are told by high level supporters of one of your former opponents that your choice for a running mate can only be one person, because it is her "right."

* Lanny Davis is outside your house holding a vigil.

* Instead of being able to use your limited air time fighting the opposing party's nominee, you're forced to answer question after question about how you're going to handle the bruised egos of two members of your own party.

* You find yourself in the odd position of having to raise money to pay off debts accumulated from airtime bought to smear you.

* Loose stool.

How to get rid of a Clinton Infestation:

At present, there is no known way to completely get rid of a Clinton infestation. Clintons can only be controlled, not eradicated. Methods that can keep an outbreak from being too destructive include:

* Paying off their debts
* Excessive praise
* Providing a vacation house for them
* Flying them to said vacation house (Gulfstream IV and up)
* Treating Lanny like he's a normal human being
* Arranging for extremely large donations from shadowy foreign interests to Bill's charitable foundation
* Starting each sentence with a preamble noting their "historic achievements"

http://www.236.com/news/2008/08/16/so_you_think_you_have_a_clinto_8186.p...

Happe Talk

I detest the religious conatation (and I don't agree with Rick Warren) and maybe it will end with this election .....

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/48650.html

From Rick Warren, "As a pastor, I believe in the separation of church and state, but I don't believe we can separate religion from politics, because one's faith determines one's worldview, which informs one's decisions and determines how one would lead."

I guess JFK spoke to the Baptist Convention but this seems far afield to that ....

It's beautiful day in KS, too.

Takecare, :) :) :) :)

Peace

Deborah from Kansas

http://pubrecord.org/nationworld/254.html?task=view

Report: U.S. Spent $100 Billion on Contractors in Iraq

By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
Monday, August 11, 2008

Favoured : 8

Published in : Nation/World

The United States has spent roughly $100 billion on private contractors in Iraq since the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003, according to a government report.

The report, by the Congressional Budget Office, says "that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies, in a war zone where employees of private contractors now outnumber American troops,” the Times reported Monday evening.

The CBO report for the first time puts a price tag on the cost of outside contractors. The report underscores the degree to which the Iraq war has been privatized. But experts believe that the federal government actually spent more than $100 billion on contractors since the war began....

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

They obviously don’t teach cold war history at the law schools at Columbia in New York or George Washington in the nation’s capital, otherwise Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who attended both institutions, would have thought twice about encouragement from the US for his ill-fated attack on South Ossetia a week ago. Saakashvili could have read vivid accounts of broadcasts, via the CIA-controlled Radio Free Europe, encouraging the Hungarians in 1956 to believe that if they rose against the Soviet occupier NATO troops would race to their aid.

Hungarian-language programs broadcast news of the unfolding political and military drama in Budapest as the radio station advised on tactics of armed resistance. The CIA’s director of operations, Frank Wisner, had promoted Hungarian hopes for intervention, but President Eisenhower never had the slightest intention of doing so. Wisner was devastated and suffered a severe breakdown, ultimately committing suicide.

Another lesson for Saakashvili from this period of fierce cold war tension came in the dawn of the Kennedy administration, when Cuban exiles seeking to topple Castro in the Bay of Pigs landing, waited vainly for US air support which they thought the CIA had guaranteed. Kennedy declined to make such an order and the furious exiles claimed they had been stabbed in the back. Some think they took revenge with the assassination of JFK nearly three years later.
www.counterpunch.org
*

Is GREED a form of OBSESSIVE BEHAVIOR?

There is an entire class who cannot satisfy their GREED -- like Cheney, the Bush Family, the attendees of the Bohemian Grove 'festivities', the Oligarchists like David Rockefeller et al and the Corporate CEOs who serve the Oligarchy -- and will do anything to FEED THEIR GREED. Why are they allowed the freedom to inflict destruction on the world and its inhabitants in the name of their GREED?

Why should the GREEDY be allowed to endlessly express their uncontrollable irrational impulse to destroy anything and anyone in order to act on their GREED obsession?

don't comment when just waking up from nap

Sorry to spring this on you all. (Please read.) re: Tim Bee
Submitted by Sir Real on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 2:46pm.
This is a true story....
===============================================

Hi Sir Real.
I went to his TimBeeForCongress website thing and saw this (below).

IS he "adopting" the child? It sounds like your friend's friend is out of the loop somehow. If he were in the loop on an adoption process, wouldn't he be able to contest the adoption formally?

If there is NOT an adoption process, then it appears Tim Bee would be lying on his website. Lying (IF he is lying about the adoption process being for real) to voters isn't a nice thing.

But VERY important is - what is BEST for the child? So I don't know enough to recommend what is best for the little girl. If her parents have problems or habits that can be harmful to the child, I tend to think that it is best if she is with loving relatives rather than dysfunctional parents who can confuse or psychologically scar her.

Evidently, this has stirred feelings of injustice in the parents. It's a King Soloman thing in the end. Children are to be loved, not possessed. How does that fit in this situation?

=============================================

http://www.timbee.com/about/

FATHER

Tim and his wife Grace, married thirteen years, have six children, including Anneliese, a foster child who they are adopting. Esther and Victoria enjoy ballet and chorus, having performed with the Tucson Academy of Ballet, the Tucson Regional Ballet Company and the Tucson Girls Chorus. The boys, Bentley and Sterling, enjoy spending time with their father on home improvement projects. Patricia enjoys playing dress up. The Bees are very active in their church community. Tim’s commitment to his family has always been a driving factor in his decision to commit his life to public service to make Arizona a better place for his family to live and work.

Good for the Goose
In the wake of Sen. McCain's (R-AZ) despatch of Sens. Lieberman (I-CT) and Graham (R-SC) to Georgia, Senator and possible vice-presidential pick Joe Biden is set to visit Georgia this weekend. "I am going to Georgia this weekend to get the facts first-hand and to show my support for Georgia's people and its democratically-elected government," Biden said in a statement released today.

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/08/new_mccain_ad_ma...

GOP rejects Pelosi's energy proposal
By Jackie Kucinich

Republicans lambasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) energy plan Saturday advising her to “get out of the way” if she was not going to accept GOP solutions to the energy crisis.

In her Saturday radio address Pelosi announced that Democrats would consider opening up parts of the outer continental shelf for drilling as a part of a broad new energy plan that will be unveiled in the coming weeks.

The Democratic initiative will also seek to release oil from the 700 million barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve, require oil companies to pay billions of dollars Democrats believe they owe to invest in clean energy resources, increase the use natural gas and create a federal Renewable Electricity Standard.

Pelosi said Democrats would also seek to investigate the role speculation has played in the rising cost of oil.

“We hope our Republican colleagues will join in a bipartisan effort, not only to increase domestic supply, but also to help consumers and to protect the environment,” she said.

Republicans soundly rejected Pelosi’s proposal – indicating it was too little too late.

“Madame Speaker, we ask you to work with us to help Americans feeling pain at the pump by developing more American energy,” said Republican Study Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas). “If you refuse, we simply ask you get out of the way and allow us to help the people that sent us here.They understand how flawed and out of touch your caucus is on energy issues, and so do we.”

Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) added, ““There is no better, more qualified spokesperson for the Democratic Party’s failed energy policies than Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”

Republicans are in week three of a protest on the House floor that began after Pelosi adjourned Congress for August recess without announcing a plan to deal with the energy crisis. They have called for her to bring Congress back into session.

Earlier this week, in an interview on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” she dropped her firm opposition to an offshore drilling vote.

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/gop-rejects-pelosis-energy-proposal-...

Michael Ledeen Leaves AEI Neoconservative historian and writer Michael Ledeen has left the American Enterprise Institute, his intellectual base for almost two decades, Mother Jones has learned. The decision for Ledeen, a veteran of the Iran contra affair, and AEI to part ways "has been in the works for a while" an associate who confirmed the recent departure describes. (Ledeen is no longer listed among the think tank's scholars).

For those who follow foreign policy events at the think tank, one might have noticed that Ledeen has been absent for the most part from many of AEI's public events for the past several months. From afar, one sensed that Ledeen may be too controversial for AEI's other scholars to want him to be the public face of the think tank in particular on Iran issues, an observation the associate described as reasonable. (See this and this for background). Ledeen did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

And yet, while AEI's in house team of foreign policy hands (Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka, etc.) has noticeably restrained itself from as aggressively publicly promoting a military option on Iran as might be expected, still it is home to those such as former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton who says whatever he wants -- almost always predictably disparaging of a diplomatic solution to any crisis from North Korea to Iran. And as a longtime loyal home for many who were associated with the most hawkish positions of the Bush administration (Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Lynn Cheney and formerly her husband), it's hard to imagine that it was any extreme ideological position which would have prompted the departure. And Ledeen was described as always a good fundraiser for the think tank. So his departure is somewhat perplexing.

Ledeen is not alone in being scarcer at the influential think tank of late. Former Reagan administration Pentagon official Richard Perle is often in France and rarely makes public appearances at AEI any more; but there's no talk of Perle leaving AEI, although his role there is largely "emeritus" the associate described. Ledeen is now the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a small Washington think tank headed by former Republican National Committee spokesman Cliff May.

Update: Turns out Ledeen already mentioned the move from AEI to FDD at his own blog, Faster Please:

... I always thought it was stupid to go to Alaska in August. I love August in Washington, I adore hot and humid and so Washington is a dream come true for me. Plus, no Congress, which means much less traffic, and you can get tables in restaurants. Plus, I moved my office from AEI after twenty happy years, to Cliff May’s rising Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. It seems a good fit, it puts me in the same sandbox as Andy McCarthy and other terrific people, and I love the email address: michael(at)defenddemocracy.org I mean, that’s what I’m all about. …
In commenting on this post, Steve Clemons offers a priceless anecdote about how you can never really leave any of these think tanks.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/08/9280_michael_ledeen...

Sharif's party: No legal immunity for Musharraf

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan-- Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's chances of avoiding impeachment appeared to dim today as a key ruling party held firm against any deal that would protect him from criminal charges and he gave no public indication of resigning.

The country's foreign minister said Musharraf needs to make up his mind in two days.

"Musharraf is running out of time," said Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a member of the main ruling Pakistan People's Party. "If he fails to decide to quit within the next two days, the impeachment process will take its course."

Allies and rivals of Musharraf have said ongoing back-channel talks could lead to the president's exit before an impeachment motion reaches Parliament. Ruling coalition officials said today a draft of the impeachment charge sheet is awaiting approval from senior leaders.

Musharraf's spokesman has said the president is not resigning, but whether he decides to quit could depend on what his rivals are willing to offer — in particular if they will give him legal immunity and let him stay in the country.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080816/NEWS07/80816006...

If McCain starts speaking in tongue tonight.

ugh yeah, right there.

I just luv the fundies. But does anyone know why we let them vote?

Then again, gd
new
Submitted by zeek on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 12:08pm.

Extra help available to McShame

Liberal talk radio hires ex-con Ney

Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its 'Last Stand'
Pandora, Other Webcasters Struggle Under High Song Fees

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Pandora is one of the nation's most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple's iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may be others like it.

"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."

The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has provoked a number of high-stakes fights between the owners of copyrighted works and the companies that can now easily distribute those works via the Internet. The doomsday rhetoric these days around the fledgling medium of Web radio springs from just such tensions.

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.

As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/15/AR200808...

George Carlin made this woman nutty.

Check out this hand written letter here:

http://www.236.com/blog/w/lee_camp/mccain_memo_on_russia_leaked_t_8313.p...

Surprise, surprise!
new
Submitted by toniD on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 6:27pm.
GOP rejects Pelosi's energy proposal
By Jackie Kucinich

Republicans lambasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) energy plan Saturday advising her to “get out of the way” if she was not going to accept GOP solutions to the energy crisis.

In her Saturday radio address Pelosi announced that Democrats would consider opening up parts of the outer continental shelf for drilling as a part of a broad new energy plan that will be unveiled in the coming weeks.

The Democratic initiative will also seek to release oil from the 700 million barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve, require oil companies to pay billions of dollars Democrats believe they owe to invest in clean energy resources, increase the use natural gas and create a federal Renewable Electricity Standard.

Pelosi said Democrats would also seek to investigate the role speculation has played in the rising cost of oil.

“We hope our Republican colleagues will join in a bipartisan effort, not only to increase domestic supply, but also to help consumers and to protect the environment,” she said.

Republicans soundly rejected Pelosi’s proposal – indicating it was too little too late....

==========================================

THIS is the PERFECT EXAMPLE of the entire failed "strategy" of compromise (concession) of the Congress of Speaker Pelosi and the predictable response of the Reps with their "strategy" of lies.

Sickening.

Submitted by rdplum on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 4:56pm.

can be watched on cspan at 8pn
http://www.c-span.org/watch/index.asp?Cat=TV&Code=CS

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Back in the days of ``Commies'' and ``pinkos,'' of Red scares, black lists, suspicion and smear, Kim Soo-im stood out as a one-woman axis of evil, a villainess without peer.

``The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America,'' as the U.S. magazine Coronet labeled her, was a Seoul socialite said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, an American colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea.

The record of a confidential 1950 U.S. inquiry and other declassified files, obtained by The Associated Press at the U.S. National Archives, tell a different Kim Soo-im story:

The story of Kim Soo-im is a cautionary tale of political hysteria, fear-mongering and sensationalist media, from a time when historians now believe the Seoul regime secretively executed at least 100,000 leftists and supposed sympathizers.

Those killings came en masse and long ago. But this one woman's death remains, for one American, a living, deeply personal story.

Wonil Kim - son of Kim Soo-im and Col. Baird - is on a quest to learn all he can about his mother and her ordeal, to restore the truth and destroy the lies. Thus far, he says, he has found her ``an intelligent woman with a passion for life, a strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil, and drowned.''

Cho pointed out a little-known fact: In 1946, a year after the U.S. Army occupied southern Korea at World War II's end, a U.S. Embassy poll found that 77 percent of southerners wanted a socialist or communist future.

INSTEAD, the U.S. military government kept many of Japan's right-wing Korean collaborators in power, and the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, vowed to ``stamp out'' the communists

Finally, on March 1, 1950, Kim, no longer U.S.-employed, was arrested by South Korean police, joining thousands of others ensnared in President Syngman Rhee's roundups of leftists - workers and writers, teachers, peasants and others with suspect politics.

``It was witch-hunting,'' said historian Jung Byung-joon, who has studied the case. ``The South Korean police and prosecutors hated her because she was the lover of Lee Gang-kook, and then of Col. Baird, and nobody could touch her. They waited for their chance.''

Col. William H.S. Wright, head of the Korea advisory group, had testified that her confession was probably forced through ``out and out torture,'' probably near-drowning, or waterboarding, as it's now known.

``The water cure is a very common method,'' Wright said. ``Electric shock and the use of pliers is frequent.''

A Korean source backs this up. In a 2005 Seoul TV report on Kim Soo-im, longtime government propagandist Oh Jae-ho, a staunch anticommunist, said he learned from a police official that the defendant had to be carried into the courtroom to confess on the final day.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7730589

Bill Murray Has Landed! »

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CBS2 | August 15, 2008 at 06:53 PM

An exuberant Bill Murray landed safely on a lakefront beach after parachuting from a plane at the 50th annual Chicago Air and Water Show.

The actor, clad in a gold-colored jumpsuit, joked that he was nervous about jumping from 13,500 feet and almost reconsidered.

Afterward, he pretended for a moment to stagger as if dizzy, then smiled broadly, waved to the crowd and shook hands with members of the US Army Golden Knight Parachute Team.

http://cbs2chicago.com/local/Chicago.air.show.2.796587.html

Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Blowback
is a term used in espionage to describe the unintended consequences of covert operations. Blowback typically appears random and without cause, because the public is unaware of the secret operations that provoked it.[1]

A wonder what people like Wexler, think or say about her in private. What a miserable failure, she is. I hate her more than Lieberliar.

Obama Bayh Does Not Look Good On Bumper StickersTom Gregory, 08.15.2008

MGM held a movie magazine contest to rename their "next big thing." The winning entry: Joan Crawford. I hope Obama keeps this in mind before he considers putting "Obama Bayh" on bumper stickers.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-gregory/marion-morrison-couldnt-s_b_11...

Submitted by nora on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 6:00pm.

Nora, I was told by Charles, the father of Mary Rose (Anneliese), that there was no legal process ever done. Tim and Grace Bee just had CPS yank the girl and give it to them. All the CPS paperwork that may exist on Anneliese is false if it exists. (I'll have to ask Charles again)

This girl, Anneliese, is legally the niece of Tim Bee. The adoption is false & illegal.

Why don't the Bees mention that Annelies is also their niece?

The girl's mother, Joy, who is the sister to Tim Bee's wife, Grace, ... is fighting alongside her husband, Charles, to get their "abducted" kid back. ...And, have been doing so for a long time.

Charles' father was some big shot in Arizona, but died a long time ago,...and now I can't quite recall what his job title was when he was alive. It occurred to me that that is irrelevant to this story, anyway.

There is a serious established relationship between Tim Bee and Child Protective Services in Arizona, and he has been advocating getting CPS extra funding, which might explain the possible "cover-up" and the absence of specific details regarding this child, Anneliese.

I am presently trying to ascertain further details including what Grace Bee's maiden name is. Apparently, Tim Bee's wife comes from significant money.

I'm also curious as to what kind of marital spat occurred between Charles and his wife, and whether the sole reason for Grace kicking her sister out of her "extra" house was because of Charles, or something more.

There was an abnormal attachment which existed between Grace and Tim Bee and their niece, now named Anneliese, ever since she was born, I was told by Charles.

The amount and content of information I was given was so mind-blowing that I didn't ask additional questions...which now I wish I had.

I have placed a call to my friend and am waiting for a phone call back.

But, based on my intuition and having spoken with the girl's father this morning, something is hugely wrong and disturbing.

I'd heard tidbits about this girl before, but today my friend had his friend come over and tell me the story.

He and his wife, Joy, want their daughter back and can't get her. And, Grace no longer speaks with her twin sister, Joy.

On a personal note: I have been staying away from the news intentionally. This news found me.

I didn't know a single thing about Tim Bee until this morning.
And, I was blown away by this story.

Anneliese's father, Charles, is so devastated that he doesn't even look up hardly. He just stares at the ground.
He's a completely broken man. And, I want to help.

Using Google is not helping me much. So, I'm trying to gather further information from Charles. I may not have it until tomorrow, regrettably.

If this story is true, & I'm feeling real sure it is...
then this could be a huge revelation which could end Tim Bee's campaign before the election.

Charles' hopelessness is based on how powerful Tim Bee is.

I, personally, just want to get this girl back to her parents. Somehow.

I wish I knew more. But, I will ... soon.

Thank you so much for taking the time to look into this, Nora.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UizEAp02K4U

The little girl is being held by Tim Bee's wife, Grace, in the commercial at the link above.

Not that it matters. (Good story for tonight's audience though.)

Old legal feuds divided, linked McCain and ex-wife

By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer 54 minutes ago

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - An old lawsuit on record at the city courthouse reveals a moment of friction between John McCain's mother and his ex-wife. Years later, McCain and his former wife presented a united front in a lawsuit of their of their own.

McCain, the Republican candidate for president, calls the first lawsuit a mistake and says he never authorized the second. Both legal actions were settled out of court before they went to trial.

Curiously, although the records clearly list the plaintiffs, McCain's campaign says his mother's 1980 lawsuit was filed "unintentionally" and that the Arizona senator didn't know about or authorize the 1990 lawsuit with his ex-wife, Carol. And McCain's 96-year-old mother, Roberta, says she never sued Carol

OTHERS INVOLVED DISPUTE THOSE ASSERTIONS.n a brief telephone interview, Roberta denied filing the lawsuit.

"I have never heard of what you're talking about. ... I will put my hand on a Bible," she said, to attest that she had never sued Carol.

Roberta's denial prompted laughter from her former daughter-in-law.

"Yes, she sued me," Carol said in a brief phone interview.

In the 1990 lawsuit, John and Carol McCain jointly sought $1 million in punitive damages after a property management firm mistakenly threw out some McCain family treasures from a garage the McCains shared with an adjacent townhouse. The lost items included letters McCain wrote to his wife as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

But the lawyer who represented the McCains said she did indeed speak to McCain and get his permission to sue on his behalf.

"You can be sure that I talked to and got the permission of any client who is listed as a plaintiff," said attorney Barbara P. Beach.

It would be a serious violation to file an unauthorized lawsuit, and "I haven't been disbarred yet," Beach said with a laugh.

According to court papers, when the townhouse next door to the McCains' townhouse changed hands, a property management firm mistakenly threw everything out of the garage, unaware that half the garage belonged to the McCains.

By 1990, only Carol lived in Alexandria, but she and her ex-husband continued to jointly own the property.

The defendants argued the McCains were out of line in seeking punitive damages because there was no evidence anybody acted maliciously.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080816/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_old_lawsuits

An odd example of ‘putting country first’
By: Steve Benen @ 11:28 AM - PDT
In late June, the McCain campaign was aggressively pushing the line that John McCain has taken political risks by working with Dems on important issues. Pressed for a recent example to bolster the claim, a campaign spokesperson said, “It’s fairly significant that Senator McCain worked on the immigration reform legislation while he was pursing the nomination of his party,” adding that he “reached across the aisle despite a heated primary campaign.”

And this week, as the McCain campaign began to push the line that Barack Obama doesn’t put “country first,” the same team relied on the same example. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reported:

I asked McCain’s closest advisor and friend, Mark Salter, for an example of a time when Obama did not “put the country first.” His answer: the Senate maneuvering of immigration legislation.

In his view, Obama did big labor’s bidding by helping to kill the chances for a grand compromise on immigration reform.

“His campaign came before his country,” Salter told me in an e-mail.

In other words, if you weren’t for McCain’s deal, you didn’t put the country first.

Fineman’s right to find Salter’s argument foolish, but the argument is actually even worse than Fineman suggests: McCain wasn’t for McCain’s deal, which suggests McCain didn’t put country first, either.

(Read the rest of this story…)

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/08/16/an-odd-example-of-putting-count...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AgDeCPgoiA

Go practice your faith and leave the rest of us all.

I'm so sick of these people.

McCain in Jan. 2002: ‘Next up, Baghdad!’
The New York Times runs a lengthy article today on how the 9/11 attacks contributed to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) foreign policy, particulary his aggression towards Iraq. “A terrorist resides in Baghdad,” he said in Feb. 2002, adding, “A day of reckoning is approaching”:

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!” […]

“These networks are well-embedded in some of these countries,” Mr. McCain said on Sept. 12, listing Iraq, Iran and Syria as potential targets of United States pressure.

In written answers to the Times, McCain blamed “Iraq’s opacity under Saddam” for any misleading remarks he made about the threat. Weeks after 9/11, McCain told Larry King that he would have named Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell to a McCain cabinet. “Oh, yes, and Cheney,” McCain added, saying he would have offered Dick Cheney the vice presidency.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/08/16/mccain-in-jan-2002-next-up-baghdad/

this forum is not very meaty

Happe Talk

I, for example have faith we will continue to get screwed by corporations.

But he said a union is between a man and a woman.

but that he believes in civil union.

The question of evil....None of the question contained transforming evil.

Happe Talk

No rights for gays

No rights for women

No rights for children

Fetuses however get full rights.

Mich., Fla. could get full voting rights

LANSING, Mich. — Last year, Michigan and Florida Democrats were being told they would lose all their votes at the Democratic National Convention if they moved up their presidential primaries.

Now, the same committee that stripped Florida and Michigan of their delegates for violating party rules by holding early primaries is poised to suggest those delegates regain their full voting powers when the Denver convention starts in eight days.

Michigan held its presidential primaries on Jan. 15 and Florida did the same on Jan. 29, breaking national Republican and Democratic rules that said most states couldn't hold their 2008 primary contests before Feb. 5.

Michigan and Florida, both major swing states with diverse populations and a lot of electoral votes, said they were more representative of the country and deserved an early say in the selection process.

That led to a bruising intraparty squabble. Democrats in both states warned that the eventual Democratic nominee risked losing their states in November if they were punished. Some Florida Democrats took legal action to get their delegates seated, and neither state got preprimary campaign visits from candidates Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Because the Republican National Committee stripped both states of only half their delegates, both had vigorous GOP primaries that drew candidates and TV ads. All the Michigan and Florida delegates will get seated at the Sept. 1-4 Republican National Convention in St. Paul But only half will get to vote, according to Michigan GOP spokesman Bill Nowling.

For former Florida Democratic Chairman Scott Maddox, it was a year of party infighting that didn't need to happen.

"When this first occurred ... I said whatever the Republicans do with their delegations, we will do the same. The difference is we will have a food fight in the middle," said Maddox, who sits on the Democratic National Committee's Credentials Committee that will take up the matter next Sunday. "It seems our party cannot avoid having a free-for-all."

Detroit attorney Curtis Blessing, a DNC Credentials Committee member from Michigan, said he's glad the matter is finally getting resolved by Democrats.

"It has always been my opinion that the Michigan delegation would have a full vote at the convention," he said. "We are now a unified party."

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Mich._Fla._could_get_full_voting_0816.html

Happe Talk

Submitted by maggiesboy on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 3:03pm.
...fookin' intellectual grammarical nazis!
--------
My quest for the name of a horizontal caret is not a part of my usual spelling and grammar Nazi duties.

It is borne by my interest in words and their etymologies.

The inequality signs (> and <) were apparently unnamed when they came into existence to denote greater-than and less-than in mathematics. Why name them when they function without names? That's my guess as to why they didn't receive a proper moniker at the outset.

But after they entered into frequent use, they were borrowed for other purposes which is why they need a name to signify the symbol regardless of purpose.

If you research diacritical marks, punctuation marks and other stray symbols that are not letters or numbers, you will find that many symbols have several names dependent upon their purposes and dependent upon the language of the people who are naming them.

The confusion over diacritical marks forced scholars devoted to linguistics to throw in the towel and create an internationally-adopted series of symbols to denote the many sounds that can come out of a human mouth (International Phonetic Alphabet). Try to spell a tongue-click sometime, then try to spell several of them rising in amplitude without slobbering on your keyboard.

If you think that umlauts and circumflexes are confusing, you should read a scholarly linquistics tome that requires knowledge of international linguistics symbols. I have a college entry-level linguistics textbook that outlines the symbols in the first few chapters...chapters which are now nearly too dogeared to read because I am incapable of remembering the sound that a symbol represents for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

The textbook opens with the statement that only a few of the many symbols will be discussed because the reader is a long way from having a doctorate in linquistics which is required to know Who's On First and What's On Second instead of I Don't Know is pretty much everywhere.

I liken the task of communicating sounds using text to the task of explaining how the color red looks to the human eye using text. (If you have ever tried to understand the sound of a bird song by its description in a bird book, you know what I'm talkin' about. "Chick-a-dee. Chick-a-dee." What the fuck is that? W.C. Fields?)

Some of the punctuation and other symbols were named by printers in the days when type was set one piece at a time. They tired of asking for "You know, one of those squiggly thingies that looks a little like an over-caffienated Rhesus monkey," so they made-up a name out of thin air ("Squiggly Thingie" wasn't included, though it should have been).

The broad-based confusion over the names of symbols isn't improving with time. What was once a period or a decimal point is now a period, a decimal point, or a dot depending upon its application. And now slashes and dashes are being replaced with dots when denoting day-month-year calendar dates. Will the madness never end? (Note that dashes are also known as hyphens...but I digress in a flurry of frustration.)

It would behoove our ability to communicate succinctly if we agreed on a single name for any given symbol.

Try to wade through this maw without getting a headache:

http://www.answers.com/topic/international-phonetic-alphabet

because they aren't passing the plate around.

We all have faith in something.

It should be clear by Brzezinski's comments that Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia was not another incoherent exercise in neocon chest-thumping, but part of a larger strategy to drag Russia into an endless conflict that will sap its resources, decrease its prestige on the global stage, weaken its grip on regional power, strengthen frayed alliances between Europe and America, and divert attention from a larger campaign in the Gulf. It is particularly worrisome that Brzezinski appears to be involved in the planning. Brzezinski, Holbrooke and Albright form the "Imperialist A-Team"; these are not the bungling "Keystone Cops" neocons like Feith and Rumsfeld who trip over themselves getting out of bed in the morning. These are cold-blooded Machiavellian imperialists who know how to work the media and the diplomatic channels to conceal their genocidal operations behind a smokescreen of humanitarian mumbo-jumbo. They know what they are doing and they are good at it. They're not fools. They have aligned themselves with the Obama camp and are preparing for the next big outbreak of global trouble-making. This should serve as a sobering wake-up call for voters who still think Obama represents "Change We Can Believe In".
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20508.htm
*

Happe Talk

Oh they'll get to the collection plate. After Obama and McCain leave, the pastor will put the guilts on the congregation. He'll remind them of the money that is needed to do God's will. How many of you can give 1000? I'm going to put the first 1000 in! He's lying of course. How many of you can give 500? Come on now! Don't let Jesus down! How bout 300? 200? 100? Etc., etc.

edna. The plate came first. I forgot about that part. This is faith at it's best I guess.

From the International Phonetic Alphabet link I provided previously:

"...and the alphabet was last revised in May 2005, when a symbol for the labiodental flap was added."

So much joke material, so few in the audience.

human trafficking. The GOP has been pro-slavery for so long it's going to be hilarious.

There is only three tenants from evangelicals
Submitted by edna ellen poe on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 8:32pm.
No rights for gays

No rights for women

No rights for children

Fetuses however get full rights.
---------
edna,

Check your arithmetic. 1+1+1+1>3

I suggest that you add:

No Darwinian-sourced science allowed unless you are in the hospital and prayer ain't workin'.

BUSH AND SAAKASHVILI....Josh Marshall on the Russo-Georgian war:

The truth is that the US screwed up here in a big way. This isn't to excuse the Russians. But we pumped the Georgians up as our big Iraq allies, got them revved up about coming into NATO, playing all this pipeline politics, all of which led them to have a much more aggressive posture toward the Russians than we were willing, in the final analysis, to back up. So now they've gotten badly mauled.

I've read variations on this theme about a hundred times now, and I really feel like some pushback is in order. The idea that we somehow prompted Mikheil Saakashvili to undertake his invasion of South Ossetia last week just doesn't bear scrutiny.

Look: Saakashvili came to power on a Georgian nationalist platform of recovering Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He's been jonesing for an excuse to send troops in for years, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do. Likewise, Putin has been eagerly waiting for an excuse to pound the crap out of him in return — again, regardless of anything the U.S. did or didn't do. (You don't think Russia was able to mount a highly precise counterattack within 24 hours just by coincidence, do you?)

Now sure, in general, Kosovo + missile shield + NATO enlargement + resurgent Russian nationalism formed the background for this war, and maybe the U.S. has played a bad hand on this score. But Bush administration officials have said for months (i.e., before the war started, meaning this isn't just post hoc ass covering) that they've urged Saakashvili to stay cool. And I believe them. What else would they do, after all? There was never any chance that we were going to provide Georgia with military help in case of a Russian invasion, and it's improbable in the extreme that anyone on our side said anything to suggest otherwise. When Saakashvili says, just hours before sending troops into South Ossetia, that he understands this means war with Russia but he "cannot imagine the West not coming to Georgia's aid," he's being delusional.

The U.S. should have played a smarter, longer-term game here. But that said, supporting Georgia's future entry into NATO and helping to modernize their military really isn't the same thing as encouraging Saakashvili to start a war with Russia. It just isn't.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_08/014312.php

Obama is very smooth....this is suspicious
Submitted by mhappenow on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 8:43pm.
------

Perhaps we have become so accustomed to bumbling idiots, that we are actually suspicious of some one who isn't. Footage of John Kennedy seems surreal to me. It appears unfathomable that he was a president of the United States.

I have no doubt that McCain was given the questions ahead of time.

because his first wife got what she deserved?

because Regan liked him when he was young?

because he'll keep us safe by fighting Russia?

YEAY! McCain for Preznit

because he'll drill here, drill now, pay less?

It will take a lot of prayer, for sure.

Don't like what he is saying though

Happe Talk
H

Happe Talk

PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) - John McCain gave up his interest in two homes and agreed to pay $1,625 a month in alimony and child support when he divorced his first wife 20 years ago, court records show.

alot tonight

he's giving us a torture stress position and religion speech. How fun is this! I'm loving it.

Happe Talk

Submitted by mhappenow on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 9:17pm.
----

It's pure bullshite M'hap!

He has to have known the questions in advance.

Steve is snoring again
Submitted by mhappenow on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 9:19pm.
-----
Time to break out the air freshener.

Hypocrite on board!

of Pro-Life

Top McCain Flip Flops: #4. Roe vs Wade:

In August 1999, McCain told the San Francisco Chronicle that he would "not support repeal of Roe vs Wade" because it would force women to undergo illegal operations.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/10/mccain-flips-on-abortion_n_1011...

I really like it when he says things like "gates of hell" and "radical extremist Islamics". Sounds like a dog barking at the moon kinda stuff.

I would like to make a motion that no one should be permitted to proclaim that the collapse of the twin towers resulted in the death of American lives.

The victims were international.

Happe Talk

Happe Talk

What you talkin bout McCain?

because he knew the damn questions in advance and practiced them.

He's not that sharp other times! And he hasn't um'd at all!

Odor-induced sleep apnea:

The silent but deadly disease.

member of the worse than do-nothing Congress talking about anyone else's vacation. I love irony!

Submitted by toniD on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 9:32pm.
-----

ToniD, I said the exact same thing earlier.

McCain is playing the crowd for suckers.

He knows damn well who the rich are. He's in their pants.

___
bluerootsradio

om shiowa shankara hari hari ganja.

may his soul hunt up blessing to bring to you.

may he hunt all the universes.

tell me about him

when you can

Gbasin.

I am tired and McCain is droning on.

Two reasons, but not excuses, for fart jokes.

the security vs privacy question.

Mc cain is practiced. He doesn't speak like this at the townhall meetings and he is often stumped.

I can't stand this man.

Sorry to spring this on you all. (Please read.) re: Tim Bee
Submitted by Sir Real on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 2:46pm.
This is a true story.

---

Charlie McCarty was the attorney general of Arizona in the '50s.

*******
And,if he has enough money get a Private Investigator..

Contact his Congressperson..

And,Child Services.

Email Tips:

americablog@40starpower.net

tips@rawstory.com

metro@washpost.com

news-tips@nytimes.com

Sorry,That's all I can think of..Good Luck :)

Bbl..

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

I can't stand the whistle when he talks. Bad false teeth?

The Warren told Obama no stump speach but is allowing McCain to stump!

Warren is permitting McCain to do stump speeching.

The following is taken from:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

"Twenty-one minutes in, Rick Warren raises the issue of abortion with a very direct, precise question: "At what point does a baby get human rights ?"

Pro-choice Obama ducks a direct answer, telling Warren that decision is "above my pay grade"..."
----------------
The correct answer is: "A human progeny is entitled to human rights when it can also be charged with committing a crime."

That's how it works. If you are designated as an equal societal entity, you must to be liable for both the good and the bad.

every time he stumps he puts another loop on his noose. He's hanging himself in bullshit that will be decomposed in the papers by morning.

...the same shit Bush said. Now I understand Sinclair's statement, "It is difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."

Vote for McCain people or you'll never have the chance to be rich just like him. Of course he had to commit adultery and get divorced to get that rich, but that's OK because he's now a Baptist and maybe still Episcopalian depending on the venue where he's talking.

Thank God for bygones and do-overs!

___
bluerootsradio

and learn to control the conversation...Bush was a master at that

Happe Talk

Not any one else.

genius!

They'll say how great McCain was.

Pat Buchanan blows McCain on MSNBC. Go figure?

Two right wingers Bernard and Buchanan said McCain was the man.

Fernando,

I have modified Bait's Personhood Maxim over time.

For many years I stated, "When a human progeny can be issued a Social Security number, it is entitled to human rights."

The capability of being issued a Social Security number, when used as the determining factor, seems a little too bureaucratic. By shifting the focus into the legal realm (i.e. capable of being charged with a crime), the bureaucratic element is removed.

It is doubtful that an infant would be convicted of a criminal act but, in theory, an infant is bound by the same laws as an eight-year-old or a fifty-year-old.

A fetus is not.

Saying Obama talked to Warren and McCain spoke to the audience

because it's been in the news lately because of Edwards.

...the same shit Bush said. Now I understand Sinclair's statement, "It is difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
==========================
This is a wise statement. But it really only applies when you are talking about well paid pundits, managers and other members of the coordinator class. How does it apply to a working stiff whose interests are rarely served by Republcans?
*TLL*

to see McCain playcall the old "Dirty Ruskies", end around for Joe "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition", sixpack. Reagan would be proud.

..very soon.
___
bluerootsradio

just got in from the Seattle thing

I left early... along with a stream of other people. The accoustics/ mic work was HORRIBLE.

I complained to one of the kids who organized it. He said (and I quote) "Can YOU fix the sound?" I said, "I'm sorry, man. I'm a director, not a sound guy."

I yelled "BIGOT" at Malloy. His face turned beet red. Mission accomplished.

Oh, and... no one disagreed with me.

www.sigzone.blogspot.com

toniD,

I continue to be curious about the impact of polls using land-lines only for their surveys.

If there is a substantial "youth" vote, it seems to be under-polled.

Do you believe that the voters who depend only upon cell phones will prove that the polls are significantly flawed?

But I do think these votes are not at all represented in the polls. Probably 18-30. Thats lots of Obama supporters.

Happe Talk

Submitted by mhappenow on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 10:29pm.
But I do think these votes are not at all represented in the polls. Probably 18-30...
------
(...and one Fernando.)

There are none from really progressive religious groups.

Tony Perkins -Focus On the Family.

David Brody- from Christian Broadcast Company ( Pat Roberson's group)

William Schneider - CNN's senior political analyst) is a fellow from the American Enterprise Institute)

IT'S TIME: Greed must be classified as a mental illness
Submitted by nora on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 4:11pm.
Seriously.

---------------------------
You are calling for a revolution. Our system is based in greed. Do you think those at the top would agree to such a thing. Wait a minute: they are really benevolent.
*TLL*

on the tubes.

the military flag raising thing was a nice touch.

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

The young are tied to cell phones and many don't have land lines. Another thing. Would they actually take a poll?

Submitted by toniD on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 10:42pm.
The young are tied to cell phones and many don't have land lines. Another thing. Would they actually take a poll?
------
LOL. BRB.

Has Elvis on with th Rat Pack. Frank, Dean, Joey,Sammy from the 60's. Black and white TV tape. Good show! Elvis had just returned from the Army. That's when I met him in Las Vegas. I was 16 and only allowed to go in to the Casino with my mother who was playing the slot machine next to Elvis and body guards. I had to leave after meeting him.

Is this the aniversary of his death or something?

Gizmo is gone...
Submitted by Sunshine Jim on Sat, 08/16/2008 - 9:35pm.

He lived on our property with Louise
and came and went as he pleased
toddlers would amuse him, then they'd abuse him
but to all he would appease

Jim he was a country cat, and had a wonderful life of 16 years.

16 years is a good long life for any cat.

I have two cats. One is happy to be indoors, the other would rather live outside. Both wish the 2 Jack Russells would move to the moon. ;-)
___
bluerootsradio

That [Clinton-era] political sludge was on display in Pittsburgh last weekend as the Democratic platform committee put the finishing touches on a draft set of “principles” for its national convention to adopt and its candidates to ignore. The platform was of course, shot through with “compromises.” The Associated Press (AP) focused primarily on the (alleged) potential “flash-point” issue of single-payer. With “little dissent -- or room for it” the 186-member committee took any reference to single-payer “off the table” (AP). Instead the Party “declar[ed] itself ‘united behind a commitment that every American man, woman, and child be guaranteed to have affordable, comprehensive health care.’”

“United behind a commitment,” huh? These are weasel words which trumpet the descent of the Democratic Party remnant. The slack-jawed, vanquished, personality cultists who labor in this hollow shell/money-drop bide their time, and await the national convention and the coronation.
http://www.counterpunch.org/rhames08162008.html

Last week Dave Marsh, on his Sunday Sirius show on DisOrder channel 33, seemed to spend half his show talking about Wexler. He said he knew Jerry was sick and didn't want to wait until he passed to sing his praises. That was prescient of him.

I wonder if he'll dedicate all of tomorrow's two hour show on him now that he's gone?

___
bluerootsradio
Signin' off here people. See you in the morning.

Domestic pets are such wonderful beings.

Seattle thing with Sam & all wasn't broadcasted ?

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

A few minutes ago I opened an email informing me of the death last Tuesday of a lady I know in the Caribbean. We have corresponded since my move back to the states. I owed her a return email in response to hers sent August 2 informing me of the island jazz festival in November and offering me a place to stay.

This sucks. She was a few years older than I am...maybe 58 or so. She was reared on a farm in Maine, graduated from college in Boston and moved to the Caribbean shortly thereafter.

I've received emails regarding her death from several island friends. Sandra was an anchor who kept us together even after some of us scattered across the globe.

Her husband lost his wife and I've lost a funny and witty piece of the past.

Harry and Louise

In 1993, one of the single-payer movement’s most prominent leaders, Dr. David Himmelstein (Physicians for a National Health Program) gained some face-time with Ms. Clinton. The Washington Monthly reported, “Himmelstein’s studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine since 1986, showed that the U.S. could save as much as $67 billion in administrative costs alone by cutting out the 1,500 private insurers and going to a single government insurer in each state --- easily enough to pay to cover every uninsured American.”

“Hillary had heard it all before,” the Monthly continued. “How, she asked Himmelstein, do you defeat the multibillion-dollar insurance industry? ‘With presidential leadership and polls showing that 70 percent of Americans favor ... a single-payer system,’ Himmelstein recalls telling Mrs. Clinton. “The First Lady replied. ‘Tell me something interesting, David.’”
R. Rhames

Gizmo the cat

did'nt wear a hat

just a purr

and some fur.

Happe Talk

love em while you can

and let em know.

i hate dismissive assholes.

is like raising a pair of chainsaws.

I knew one who bounced in place like a pogo stick ceaselessly.

Happe Talk

I'll have to catch up with ya all
been doing yard work - house cleaning
Beautiful day today weather wise.

pogo stick jack russels

got one

the ladies in the parts store though it was a hoot

encouraged him

now he barks as soon as i get within 3 blocks of the store

ruzz likes to hunt the aisles...

gorguss day here too!

stalled for parts on the truck

i got to have a good motorsickle day!

Hopefully all shitty days are behind you :)

it was a great motorsickle day today.
I wish I had one - maybe after I get a house.
What were you riding today??
pup's sound like there doing good -

been a little while
hope tings is well you & yours

1st western music I've heard at a venue
women's single sculls medal race

MC Hammer- U can´t touch this

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

fernando?

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

Im going to bed -
nite all & sweet dreams to everyone.

did'nt ride anywhere

just getting the prep work done prior to firing up for the first time with everything working.

today i tore into all the electrical connections cleanng them up so they make good contact.

If we could all just learn to do what we are told,

not cause trouble, leave the original thinking

to the people in charge,

the world could be such a beautiful place.

"Yea but it's so smoggy"

"Shut up - Get back in line."

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

looking better every hour that goes by.

am i missing anything?

the $4000 dash for survival.

Hey smcgee43! It's not easy especially these days. The orange oil worked jbenet but it doesn't linger long. They come back. I keep a spray bottle around so the problem is solved. I do recommend it if you are going pesticide free. Its a great cleaning agent too.

Was SAM awesome on Ring of Fire last week or WHAT?

So much blogging, so little time! I'm way too busy with REAL LIFE issues (putting food on my family, for one) to keep up with all the GREAT STUFF and LINKS on the daily thread! By the time I finish reading one story, there's a dozen more! GREAT JOB!

Anyway, I have your Sunday Funnies (with commentary) up!
http://www.samsedershow.com/node/3584

Signed,
Lurking more than posting...
-FilthyRich

In the movie "Conspiracy" (with lead actors Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci) three things stand out as so relevent to Bushworld:

o The dynamite portrayal by Colin Firth of the composer of law who surely realized that the rule of law corrupted is just a step in the process of a tyranny that disregards the rule of law and those who compose laws. (When are the Dem lawmakers going to wake up and realize their complicity won't ever buy them protection from tryrants.)

o The Final Solution is just another way to say genocide. (And so that means today, The Final Solution is still in play by those who wish to benefit in some way by the removal of another group.)

o Few of the Nazi thugs were punished for their roles in The Final Solution. (Are the crimes of genocide in the OIL WARS of Iraq and Darfur ever going to be stopped and punished?)

Why shouldn't it DNA test as oppossum? What else would a Sasquatch eat in the hills of Georgia if the berries or paw-paws weren't ripe yet? Oppossums are SHY and retiring and so is Bigfoot. Maybe the oppossum and Bigfoot have more in common than do Bigfoot and humans.

That is, if Bigfoot is real....

JFI An Intense Quake at 10:57pm 5.4 ish where I live...in Northern California

no tv here
watching on the computer

It's just the usual --

amazing beautiful moments.

and not over hyped as some have mentioned in tv watching.

=
Michael Phelps won his record eighth gold medal
at the Beijing Olympics as a member of the victorious U.S.
4x100-meter medley relay team, breaking a tie with Mark Spitz for
most golds in a single games.

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Maps/124-41.htm

http://quake.usgs.gov/waveforms/helicorder/index.html

~`~`~`~`~`~
Jamesbennett

It usually NEVER "rocks" this much here upstairs in my office unless above 5.0...gosh only a 4.6
Thanks...a wee lil one (4.6) tsk tsk
...HaHaHa I usually only respond when above 5.0 eek
I hope you are doing better...with all
Again Thanks (a wee lil 4.6 Q.) LOL ;)

And the people, who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth, then it's far too late, when they pass away.

(Beatles - Within You Without You)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6kfPnNMGKA

We were talking, about the love that's gone so cold
And the people, who gain the world and lose their soul
They don't know, they can't see. Are you one of them?

...

Oh, I don't know, I may be.

Pixies - Where Is My Mind

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/10/14/1508938/First%20Manifesto%20of%20Surrealism.pdf

A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in
times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his
manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to
sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=481DlxGYph4

Good words on that one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Pk1UYkB3I

1984 Part Deux..Sit Back and Relax..Nothin to worry your purdy little head about..We don't need No stinking privacy !

U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens (R) failed to declare an interest-free $31,000 loan that allowed him to turn a quick profit of more than $100,000 from a Florida real estate deal, federal prosecutors alleged in court documents filed Thursday. - Roll Call

I sure hope the Dem Convention is a big sucess! I worry about they way Obama is languishing in the polls. This was year the Dem was supposed to be a sure thing. I fear what I am seeing is the same slow erosion of Democratic votes. No one wants to hear Hillary say "I told ya so!"

How's everybody?

Thomas Frank may have a sense of the phenomenon of languishing Democrats. Cynicism breeds votes for Republicans, Republicans preach that government does not work, then proceed to show the truth of that statement (Katrina). People are cynical about the government now, after Bush's performance. Frank thinks they will be prone to vote McCain, as government is the problem. Is Barack doing anything to change this perception?
*

If McCain becomes president, pack your bags,for it will truly end America

John McCain's 70th birthday bash held on boat of Russian tycoon
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Jun 12, 2008, 00:17

Excerpt

(WMR) -- John McCain's campaign is trying to make political hay out of the conviction of Chicago tycoon Tony Rezko, a one-time fundraiser for presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. However, the McCain campaign wants to bury the story of McCain's 70th birthday bash held on board the yacht of a Russian aluminum tycoon in the Adriatic Sea. The party was held on August 29, 2006, McCain's birthday and followed a congressional junket by McCain and five other GOP senators to the Republic of Georgia.

The host for McCain's yacht party off the coast of the Republic of Montenegro was, according to WMR sources with close links to the Republican Party, Oleg Deripaska, one of Russia's most powerful tycoons who made his billions in cornering Russia's aluminum market in the 1990s.

The 40-year old Deripaska is also politically-connected, having married the daughter of Russia's late President Boris Yeltsin. Unlike most other Russian tycoons, who now live in exile abroad and are protected by Israeli passports, Deripaska maintains close relations to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and another Russian tycoon, Roman Abramovich, who was also invested in Russia's aluminum industry. In 2000, Deripaska merged his firm, Basic Element, with Abramovich's firm, RusAl. Both tycoons maintain expensive homes in London.

Deripaska has attracted the attention of U.S. law enforcement and he has been the subject of several civil law suits filed against him because of his business practices. However, no federal criminal charges have been brought against Deripaska. That is because Yeltsin's son-in-law counts, in addition to McCain, former GOP Senator and 1996 GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole among his most ardent supporters.

con't

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3364.shtml

Watchiing c-span

Pat Choat is being interviewed. He's right in what he is saying that we are selling the US.

Author of "Dangerous Business: The risk of Globalization for America"

How you doing Toni ? Edna ? :)

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

How're you doing?

DOJ moves toward charges in Blackwater shooting.
The Washington Post reports that federal prosecutors “have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case.” A final decision “on whether to indict may not be made until October, about a year after the incident.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/08/17/doj-moves-toward-charges-in-blackwat...

Justice Department Moves Toward Charges Against Contractors in Iraq Shooting

Sunday 17 August 2008

»

by: Del Quentin Wilber and Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post

photo
Six Blackwater guards (not shown above) received target letters from federal prosecutors for last Septembers shootings that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead. (Photo: Robert Young Pelton)

Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case.

The guards, all former US military personnel, were working as security contractors for the State Department, assigned to protect US diplomats and other non-military officials in Iraq. The shooting occurred when their convoy arrived at a busy square in central Baghdad and guards tried to stop traffic.

An Iraqi government investigation concluded that the security contractors fired without provocation. Blackwater has said its personnel acted in self-defense.

The sources said that any charges against the guards would likely be brought under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which has previously been used to prosecute only the cases referred to the Justice Department by the Defense Department for crimes committed by military personnel and contractors overseas. Legal experts have questioned whether contractors working for the State Department can be prosecuted under its provisions.

The sources cautioned that prosecutors are still weighing evidence gathered in a 10-month investigation that began shortly after the shootings. A federal grand jury has heard testimony from about three dozen witnesses since November, including U.S. and Blackwater officials and Iraqis, according to two of the sources.

http://www.truthout.org/article/six-blackwater-guards-near-indictment

Happe Talk

Happe Talk

Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread
Joe Sudbay (DC) · 8/17/2008 08:27:00 AM ET · Link
5 Comments · reddit · FARK · Digg It!

Several Bush administration officials show up to remind us that he's still the president. We'll see Condi and Gates trying to explain Georgia -- and Dana Perino is on FOX, probably just doing an audition.

Speaking of auditions, there are a slew of V.P. potentials on the shows. By the end of this week, we'll know at least who Obama has chosen. On the Dem. side, you got Daschle, Bayh, Kaine and Richardson. On the GOP side: Romney, Pawlenty, Jindal, Cantor and Ridge. The theocrats are in a frenzy because McCain has said he'd consider a pro-choice vice president...that includes Ridge and Romney (and Lieberman).

Here's the lineup:
ABC's "This Week" — Defense Secretary Robert Gates; former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.; former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

___

CBS' "Face the Nation" — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.; Gov. Tim Pawlenty, R-Minn.

___

NBC's "Meet the Press" — Rice; Govs. Bobby Jindal, R-La., and Tim Kaine, D-Va.

___

CNN's "Late Edition" — Gates; Reps. Eric Cantor, R-Va., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M.; Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

"Fox News Sunday" _ Rice; former Gov. Tom Ridge, R-Pa.; Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; White House press secretary Dana Perino.

Everyone’s talking about the Georgia/Russia hostilities, and the big question for the Sunday Shows is, will Condoleeza be upstaged by the neverending evening gown competition of potential Vice-Presidential nominees? They all SAY they’re for “world peace” during the interview portion, but…

Face the Nation Georgia and Russia: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Politics: Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.); Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.).

Meet the Press Georgia and Russia: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Politics: Gov. Tim Kaine (D-Va.); Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.). Panel: Joshua Green, the Atlantic; Andrea Mitchell; Chuck Todd.

This Week With George Stephanopoulos Georgia and Russia: Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. Politics: McCain supporter former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.); Obama supporter former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). Panel: E.J. Dionne, the Brookings Institution; Michael Gerson, Council n Foreign Relations; Jan Crawford; George Will.

Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace Georgia and Russia: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Politics: McCain supporter former Gov. Tom Ridge, (R-Pa.); Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). White House Press Secretary Dana Perino. Panel: Jill Zuckman, Chicago Tribune; Bill Sammon; William Kristol; Juan Williams.

Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer Georgia and Russia: Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. Politics: McCain supporter Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.); Obama supporter Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). Georgia and Russia: Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.); Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.). Panel: Candy Crowley; William Schneider; John King.

Happe Talk

Same page! We usually are :) Not just the Blackwater story.

Happe Talk

Ok..Just trying to keep our older cat Kimmy(Female) from trying
to kill our new (Female)kitten..
It's been just too much fun..Not !

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNR9bfoWcjo

Happe Talk

Media actually doing its job this time around
John Aravosis (DC) · 8/16/2008 10:25:00 PM ET · Link

Gregg over at Editor & Publisher says the media is actually doing it job this time around re: the new Swift Boating attempts against Barack Obama. Of course, it didn't hurt that the new Swift Boater seems to have a problem with Jews, and Catholics, and he thinks a government conspiracy is hiding the truth about 9/11. Then again, with this media, even hand feeding doesn't always work.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.j...

on of these days..

I look forward to that..

It would be funny to watch him turn purple... ;)

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

I heard him that night on replay.

He cracks me up when he goes off like that.

it's when he goes off on obama that he gets to me, but this clip reminds me of why it's worth it to continue listening

mmr are you a mova-m subscriber? because mike said he's posting some videos weekly...i must admit i haven't checked them out yet so i don't know what's there really, maybe i'll do it now....

I only read the 1st section and Insight (Opinions) in the Columbus Dispatch. This is a paper that twice endorsed Bush only to file editorial after editorial on what a lousy job he was doing. Today the lead LTE was titled "We can't keep subsidizing bad choices" by a woman reciting anecdotal stories of fat women smoking in the foodbank line. Her logic is they make bad choices between their wants and needs and her taxes are enabling them. Hence my reply

We can't keep subsidizing the super-rich
While the super-rich hide in the neighborhood of $100 billion in taxes a year from the IRS, Joanne Claire writes anecdotal stories to revive thoughts of welfare mothers in Cadillacs.

Joanne is worried about her taxes, as rightly she should be. What Joanne doesn't know is the money these super-rich 1/10 of 1% or 14,000 families hide, if taxed would reimburse the government 5 times for the money the government spends on the needy. It's more than the federal goverment spends on Education and 3 times what is spent on the environment leaving it to Joanne and her husband to pick up the tab.

Joanne doesn't know that thousands of America's richest citizens (I won't even mention corporations, it's too depressing) deposit their money (over $1 trillion) in off shore banks to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. A fair share, by the way, that would not put a dent in their lavish lifestyle. Can Joanne say that about the fair share she and her husband pay?

Democracy thrives when we all pay our fair share.

Sure there will always be those with more than others but now in this country 10% of the population is controlling 90% of the wealth. That leaves the rest of us, 300,000 families to get by with the rest, but it boggles the mind to know those lucky one's at the top believe it's OK to skip on their tax responsibility. Profits trump patriotism for these people George Bush proudly called his base.

Maybe the numbers are confusing, let's scale it down. Say there were only 100 people in the country and the total wealth of the country was $100. Given the current state of things, 10 people would control $90 of those dollars while the other 90 people would have $10.

Don't blame our problems on the poor and weak, they aren't the problem, they are one of the results of the problem of all American's not paying their fair share.

Upton Sinclair said,"It's difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it." Now I know what this means.

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bluerootsradio
The source for my reply was Super-rich Tax Cheats from ANP and I promise I've driven that Sinclair quote into the ground enough for this week.

Condi is making me laugh talking tough while caving like Utah's Wall Arch.

it's actually quite fun! didn't expect it - demonstrating how his - the malloy listeners - can be as jackassish as the c-span callers, well some of them...why does that flimsy flakey avatar of another mike keeps popping up in my head, wonder why :)

He is an Obama Energy Advisor

Happe Talk

that's a good letter i hope they publish it - keep us posted on how it goes

I am going to Poland to sign a Strategic Missile Treaty (and restart the cold war)

Submitted by maggiesboy on Sun, 08/17/2008 - 9:59am.
------

It is also important to note that the Columbus Dispatch has not endorsed a Democrat since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

bobbleheadwise?

Happe Talk

Motherfuckers!!

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/15/11004/

Happe Talk

Happe Talk

The Candidate We Still Don’t Know
By FRANK RICH

AS I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election!

The poor guy should be winning in a landslide against the despised party of Bush-Cheney, and he’s not. He should be passing the 50 percent mark in polls, and he’s not. He’s been done in by that ad with Britney and Paris and by a new international crisis that allows McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III, whether Baghdad or Tehran or Moscow, and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts.

Obama has also been defeated by racism (again). He can’t connect and “close the deal” with ordinary Americans too doltish to comprehend a multicultural biography that includes what Cokie Roberts of ABC News has damned as the “foreign, exotic place” of Hawaii. As The Economist sums up the received wisdom, “lunch-pail Ohio Democrats” find Obama’s ideas of change “airy-fairy” and are all asking, “Who on earth is this guy?”

It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts. No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.

Yet surely, we keep hearing, Obama should be running away with the thing. Even Michael Dukakis was beating the first George Bush by 17 percentage points in the summer of 1988. Of course, were Obama ahead by 17 points today, the same prognosticators now fussing over his narrow lead would be predicting that the arrogant and presumptuous Obama was destined to squander that landslide on vacation and tank just like his hapless predecessor.

The truth is we have no idea what will happen in November. But for the sake of argument, let’s posit that one thread of the Obama-is-doomed scenario is right: His lead should be huge in a year when the G.O.P. is in such disrepute that at least eight of the party’s own senatorial incumbents are skipping their own convention, the fail-safe way to avoid being caught near the Larry Craig Memorial Men’s Room at the Twin Cities airport.

So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re “hearing too much” about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”

Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being “proud” of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about “whitey.” But we still haven’t been inside Cindy McCain’s tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, “lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety,” in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain’s future role in her beer empire won’t be revealed before the election.

Some of those who know McCain best — Republicans — are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama — temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others — are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.”

McCain has even prompted alarms from the right’s own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of “Unfit to Command” in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, “The Obama Nation.”

Corsi’s writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi’s publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author’s “scholarship.” If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”

As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there’s one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/opinion/17rich.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slog...

Happe Talk

I had to dig a little deeper on tD's http://www.samsedershow.com/node/3582#comment-241962 link and so'nuff, Nedra laid it out for all to see. Link below to AP ariticle.

Not enough to call for flying pigs past my window but it's a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere of toxic gas.

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from AP

It's so pathetic to vilify the poor while you're being robbed by the rich.

I meant by the way, Maggiesboy.

I haven't watched those videos of Malloy's either..

I keep forgetting..I'll try and check them out this week..

He was asking for responses from us about those video's
and,kind of hinted that he might stop making them if folks didn't let him know what they thought of them..

Something like that.. :)

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

Merkle in Georgia, says
country should be in NATO

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel is offering strong support for Georgia, saying the country is on track to become a member of NATO. Merkel flew to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080817/ap_on_re_eu/georgia_russia;_ylt=Ajvl...

she is one of my hero's.

Happe Talk

is kicking butt. Right now for example - Brewing Beer. Now tell me that's not better than Meet The Press.

the church talk.

Happe Talk

Happe Talk

We're all being robbed by the rich by the way! ;-)

Yep mhappe-her and Rebecca Solnit are my "safe zones" I go too when my anger exceeds my capacity to control it.

Ohmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

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bluerootsradio

Ninkasi
Osiris
Silenus

will you recommend your favorite? I will get it.

Happe Talk

Friends don't let friends buy Bud.

Dem Party leaders call on Obama to run sharper race on economy
Dem party leaders around the country, worried that the race against McCain looks tougher than they imagined, want Obama to sharpen his economic message and convert his popularity into a stronger sense among voters that he will improve their lives in concrete ways. "It's fine to tell people about hope and change," says Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio, "but you have to have plenty of concrete, pragmatic ideas that bring hope and change to life."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/us/politics/17elect.html?_r=1&ref=poli...

one of the few guys you can always count on to feed us something good on the sunday papers

Obama: By November, people will understand that this election is "not about me"
In an interview with CBN's David Brody, Obama responded to a question about the "celeb" sneer ads with an answer that sounded a bit like an acknowledgment that right now, the election is shaping up more as a referendum on his character than on his opponent or on their respective policies. "I think ultimately the American people are going to understand by the time they go into the polling place in November that this is not an election about me," Obama said. "This an election about them."

http://thepage.time.com/2008/08/16/cbns-brody-gets-hot-interview-with-ob...

So McSame threw out "five million" as the definition of rich in the "Faith Based Forum" last night, huh?

why not fifty million? or one billion?

I guess five was good enough to avoid addressing the question altogether and not seem freakishly out of touch even to unrealistic American fantasies of making it big. But for the rest of us, this pithy response further demonstrates McCain's lack of economic awareness and inability to find the pulse of the American working and middle classes even in the most simplest terms. It also clearly exposes him as the real elitist here.

I hope this isn't lost on Obama and his people. Sounds like ad material to me. Keep hammering this guy on the economy and he will fold. $5 million a year divides into 192,308 every two weeks! Who is this guy kidding? What percentage of Americans even make that in a year? 10%? 15%?

Pundits: McCain won the day at Saddleback Church
Some on-air pundits say McCain was the winner last night when both men appeared at the Sddleback megachurch in Orange County, California. ABC's George Stephanopoulos said that McCain "solidified his ties to the evangelical community," while Jake Tapper said that McCain "won over this crowd" with tales about his POW captivity -- you know, the topic we keep hearing McCain is reluctant to discuss.

http://www.politico.com/playbook/

Another great mind Laura Flanders turned me on to...

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Hope In the Dark | Untold Histories Wild Possibilities

I just moved my latest batch of TwoDog red wine into stage 3 i.e. claryifying. I'm fixing to run out of my homemade stuff which pisses me off.

I should try beer sometime.

Now I'm slicin' those chilies for the dehydrator, making a loaf of bread and fixin' to vacuum pack some tomatoes I froze.

Who says you can't domesticate yourself?!!?!?!?

You know Fernando there's women out there lookin' for guys like us.

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bluerootsradio

If only their parole boards would let them out! ;-)

alot better than I thought he would. He pissed me off and made Steve fall asleep but it was a better venue for his lies.

Happe Talk