We Must Educate Ourselves

Texas...a failed conservative experiment - Baltimore Nonpartisan | Examiner.com

2011-10-04T17:36:00.000-05:00

Texas...a failed conservative experiment - Baltimore Nonpartisan | Examiner.com:

'via Blog this'
Average Teacher Salary as a % of Avg Annual Pay = 49th

Current Expenditures Per Student = 44th

State Aid Per Pupil in Average Daily Attendance = 47th

% of Elementary/Secondary…Funding from State Revenue = 47th

% of Population 25 and Older With a [HS] Diploma = 50th

High School Graduation Rate = 41st

Enrollment Rates in Higher Education = 39th

Per Capita State Spending on State Arts Agencies = 47th

Percentage of Uninsured Children = 1st

Percentage of Children Living in Poverty = 7th

Percentage of Children Fully Immunized = 36th

Percentage of Children Overweight = 5th

Teenage Birth Rate = 1st

Percentage of Non-Elderly Women with Health Insurance = 50th

Rate of Women Aged 40+ Who Receive Mammograms = 42nd

Rate of Women Aged 18+ Who Receive Pap Smears = 46th

Cervical Cancer Rate = 6th

Family Planning = 45th

Women’s Voter Turnout = 49th

Percent of Mortgage Loans that are Sub prime = 8th

Percent of Households with Interest-Bearing Accounts = 41st

Private Loans to Small Businesses = 43rd

Level of Asset Poverty = 43rd

Amount of Money that Banks Located in the State Collect through Deposits in Relation to the Amount of Money the Banks Re-channel Back into Communities Through Loans = 45th

Average Credit Score = 50th

Percentage of Women Living in Poverty = 3rd
Air Pollution Emissions = 1st

Amount of [VOC's] Released into Air = 1st

Amount of Toxic Chemicals Released into Water = 1st

Amount of Recognized Cancer-Causing Carcinogens Released into Air = 1st

Amount of Hazardous Waste Generated = 2nd

Amount of Carbon Dioxide Emissions = 1st

Richest 20% of families have avg incomes 7.9 larger than poorest 20% and 2.8 times larer than middle 20%

From the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, the avg income of the poorest 20% has increased $2,657…the middle 20% has increased $4,528.

…the average income of the richest 20% increased $32,813 [in that 20 year span]
A 2002 report found that 86% of nursing homes in Texas did not meet federal standards governing quality of care, 94% of nursing homes did not meet minimum staffing levels, and 39% of facilities had a violation that caused actual harm to nursing home residents or placed them at risk for death or serious injury.

The average nursing home in Texas provided just 21 minutes of daily care by registered nurses for each resident, or less than half of the minimum required by federal standards.
Percentage of Population Uninsured = 1st

Percentage of Non-Elderly Uninsured = 1st

Percentage of Low Income Covered by Medicaid = 42nd

Percentage…with employer Based Health Insurance = 46th

Total State Government Health Expenditures as Percent of the GSP = 33rd

Per Capita State Spending on Mental Health = 48th

Percentage of Population Physically Active = 41st

Physicians – 43rd

Dentists = 42nd

Registered Nurses = 43rd

2005, the birth rate for ages 15-19 was 61.6 per 1000, compared to 40.5 in the U.S.

2001 statewide survey of Texas high school students, almost half had engaged in sexual intercourse at least once. (37.4% of 9th graders)

Among currently sexually active students, only about half reported that they or their partner had used a condom…Only 10% reported that they or their partner used birth control pills.

22.6% of sexually active students had used drugs or alcohol at the time of their last sexual intercourse.

http://www.examiner.com/nonpartisan-in-baltimore/texas-a-failed-conservative-experiment

A Friend On the Liberal Gun Club Board Inspired me to Find this.

2011-09-24T13:39:00.001-05:00

Rick Perry’s newbie mistake on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - The Fact Checker - The Washington Post

2011-09-19T14:56:00.000-05:00

Rick Perry’s newbie mistake on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - The Fact Checker - The Washington Post:

"As part of the 1993 Oslo accords, in an exchange of letters between then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Palestine Liberation Organization met all of these conditions nearly 20 years ago. The letters are posted on the Web site of the Israeli Foreign Ministry."

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Andrew Breitbart Incites Violence Against Liberals, Says Military Will Back The Tea Party Up | Addicting Info

2011-09-18T23:45:00.000-05:00

Andrew Breitbart Incites Violence Against Liberals, Says Military Will Back The Tea Party Up | Addicting Info

Dullbart doesn't realize that Progressive follow Teddy Roosevelt's advice: "Speak softly and carry a Big Stick."
Tea Party favorite Andrew Breitbartz told a conservative audience in Massachusetts that conservatives outnumber liberals and have most of the guns. He also claimed that the military is ready to take action against liberals if violence ever erupted between liberals and conservatives.

"If this isn’t proof that conservatives want a civil war, I don’t know what is. This is a call for violence, pure and simple, and an investigation should be opened immediately. If Breitbart is telling the truth about military officials backing up the Tea Party, they should be investigated and tried for treason. And Breitbart should be questioned by federal authorities as well. This is a serious threat that Breitbart is making and it should concern all liberals. The right wing wants to kill liberals. They want a civil war. Look for this kind of threat to increase as the 2012 Election nears. The Party that cheers for executions and the deaths of the uninsured are fantasizing, and probably are planning, to kill the opposition to grab absolute power." --Stephen D. Foster Jr.

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear | Wendell Berry | Orion Magazine

2011-09-11T20:22:00.001-05:00

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear | Wendell Berry | Orion Magazine

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would “grow” on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be “unprecedented”.

III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world’s people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.

IV. The “developed” nations had given to the “free market” the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological responsibility. We must recognize that the events of September 11 make this effort more necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our mistakes.

VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superseded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.

VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to “rogue nations”, dissident or fanatical groups and individuals - whose violence, though never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.

IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homelands and our lives.

X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy (either as a money economy or as a life-support system) that is global in extent, technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by “national defense”

XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must make. We can continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited “free trade” among corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable lines of communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a system will have to be protected by a hugely expensive police force that will be worldwide, whether maintained by one nation or several or all, and that such a police force will be effective precisely to the extent that it oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation.

XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local needs had been met.

XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to further terrorist attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go on as before with the corporate program of global “free trade”, whatever the cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism or public debate.

XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought, always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and citizens alike. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is actually happening in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for all we know, serious and difficult thought may be taking place there. But the talk that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.

XV. National self-righteousness, like personal self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading. It is a sign of weakness. Any war that we may make now against terrorism will come as a new installment in a history of war in which we have fully participated. We are not innocent of making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.

XVI. It is a mistake also - as events since September 11 have shown - to suppose that a government can promote and participate in a global economy and at the same time act exclusively in its own interest by abrogating its international treaties and standing apart from international cooperation on moral issues.

XVII. And surely, in our country, under our Constitution, it is a fundamental error to suppose that any crisis or emergency can justify any form of political oppression. Since September 11, far too many public voices have presumed to “speak for us” in saying that Americans will gladly accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for greater “security”. Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a reduction in security (and in global trade) far more willingly than they would accept any abridgement of our Constitutional rights.

XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult.

XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of Pearl Harbor - to which the present attack has been often and not usefully compared - we humans have suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars, none of which has brought peace or made us more peaceable.

XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but victory, and any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the violence that won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual “war to end war?”

XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.

XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.

XXIII. We must not again allow public emotion or the public media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of Islam, then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for hating us.

XXIV. Starting with the economies of food and farming, we should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the surest, the safest, and the cheapest way for the world to live. We should not countenance the loss or destruction of any local capacity to produce necessary goods

XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air. We should protect every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have left, and begin restoration of those that have been damaged.

XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

XXVII. The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a “new economy”, but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

We Must Stop Eating The Seed Corn!

2011-09-09T09:16:00.000-05:00

"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight." --Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

A Fierce Debate on the Budget

2011-03-02T17:49:00.001-06:00

Don't Surrender on Budget Priorities

Congress is in the midst of a fierce debate on the budget. In a Senate floor speech today, Bernie said it is absurd to provide tax breaks for millionaires while balancing the budget on the backs of working families. He attacked a House Republican proposal to cut more than $60 billion for the rest of this year. The bill would:

Cut $1.1 billion from Head Start depriving services for 218,000 children.

Cut $1.3 billion from Social Security delaying benefits for 500,000 Americans.

Slash $1.3 billion from community health centers taking primary health care from 11 million patients.

Reduce or eliminate Pell Grants for 9.4 million low-income college students.

Cut $405 million from Community Services Block Grants affecting 20 million seniors, families with children and the disabled.

End job training and other employment services for 8 million Americans.

What is a Real Conservative?

2010-02-02T17:17:00.002-06:00

Traditional Conservatives Believe	What the GOP today Believes
Individuals choose their own lifestyles in pursuit of happiness	Government controls lifestyles based on moral values of select religious views
Government should not be allowed to spend more money than it has	Government can borrow and spend all it wants as long as it is cutting taxes for major corporations
Individual freedoms are more important than government efforts to engineer society	A strong central government should limit freedoms based on a perceived model of an ideal society
We shouldn’t care about liberals or other political idealists – accept any good ideas they may have and just focus on what is good for America	We must minimize and do battle with liberals and anyone else who disagrees with us in any way
Individual and political ethics form a cornerstone of good government and a safe and free society	Ethics are flexible when attacking liberals and other enemies
The founders of the Constitution were religious men correct in keeping the church out of government and government out of the church as set forth in the Constitution	The founders of the Constitution were religious men who intended that the governing of America (interpretation of the Constitution) follow Christian biblical interpretations
All the powers not specifically given to the federal government are powers of the states	The federal government should override the powers of the states on issues where the states do not follow the Republican platform
If it sounds stupid, it is probably stupid, or let’s call it what it is	We must do or accept anything or anybody who supports our position, period

Health And The First World. (repost)

2009-09-16T17:04:00.000-05:00

Country	Life expectancy	Infant mortality rate	Physicians per 1000 people	Nurses per 1000 people	Per capita expenditure on health (USD)	Healthcare costs as a percent of GDP	% of government revenue spent on health	% of health costs paid by government
Australia	81.4	4.2	2.8	9.7	3,137	8.7	17.7	67.7
Canada	80.7	5.0	2.2	9.0	3,895	10.1	16.7	69.8
France	81.0	4.0	3.4	7.7	3,601	11.0	14.2	79.0
Germany	79.8	3.8	3.5	9.9	3,588	10.4	17.6	76.9
Japan	82.6	2.6	2.1	9.4	2,581	8.1	16.8	81.3
Sweden	81.0	2.5	3.6	10.8	3,323	9.1	13.6	81.7
UK	79.1	4.8	2.5	10.0	2,992	8.4	15.8	81.7
US	78.1	6.7	2.4	10.6	7,290	16.0	18.5	45.4

Serious Fun: TrueMajorityACTION.org

2009-09-14T13:12:00.001-05:00

Be of Ben and Jerry's icecream illustrates the ludicrous nature of our atomic stockpiles.
Serious Fun: TrueMajorityACTION.org

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Synopsis of H.R. 3200

2009-08-29T17:35:00.002-05:00

SUMMARY
The bill provides quality affordable health care for all Americans and controls health care cost growth. Key provisions of the bill being released this week include:
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COVERAGE AND CHOICE
􀂃
AFFORDABILITY
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SHARED RESPONSIBILITY
􀂃
CONTROLLING COSTS
􀂃
PREVENTION AND WELLNESS
􀂃
WORKFORCE INVESTMENTS
I. COVERAGE AND CHOICE The bill builds on what works in today’s health care system and fixes the parts that are broken. It protects current coverage – allowing individuals to keep the insurance they have if they like it – and preserves choice of doctors, hospitals, and health plans. It achieves these reforms through:
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A Health Insurance Exchange. The new Health Insurance Exchange creates a transparent and functional marketplace for individuals and small employers to comparison shop among private and public insurers. It works with state insurance departments to set and enforce insurance reforms and consumer protections, facilitates enrollment, and administers affordability credits to help low‐ and middle‐income individuals and families purchase insurance. Over time, the Exchange will be opened to additional employers as another choice for covering their employees. States may opt to operate the Exchange in lieu of the national Exchange provided they follow the federal rules.
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A public health insurance option. One of the many choices of health insurance within the health insurance Exchange is a public health insurance option. It will be a new choice in many areas of our country dominated by just one or two private insurers today. The public option will operate on a level playing field. It will be subject to the same market reforms and consumer protections as other private plans in the Exchange and it will be self‐sustaining – financed only by its premiums.
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Guaranteed coverage and insurance market reforms. Insurance companies will no longer be able to engage in discriminatory practices that enable them to refuse to sell or renew policies today due to an individual’s health status. In addition, they can no longer exclude coverage of treatments for pre‐existing health conditions. The bill also protects consumers by prohibiting lifetime and annual limits on benefits. It also limits the ability of insurance companies to charge higher rates due to health status, gender, or other factors. Under the proposal, premiums can vary based only on age (no more than 2:1), geography and family size.
􀂃
Essential benefits. A new independent Advisory Committee with practicing providers and other health care experts, chaired by the Surgeon General, will recommend a benefit package based on standards set in the law. This new essential benefit package will serve as the basic benefit package
for coverage in the Exchange and over time will become the minimum quality standard for employer plans. The basic package will include preventive services with no cost‐sharing, mental health services, oral health and vision for children, and caps the amount of money a person or family spends on covered services in a year.
II. AFFORDABILITY To ensure that all Americans have affordable health coverage the bill:
􀂃
Provides sliding scale affordability credits. The affordability credits will be available to low‐ and moderate‐ income individuals and families. The credits are most generous for those who are just above the proposed new Medicaid eligibility levels; the credits decline with income (and so premium and cost‐sharing support is more limited as your income increases) and are completely phased out when income reaches 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($43,000 for an individual or $88,000 for a family of four). The affordability credits will not only make insurance premiums affordable, they will also reduce cost‐sharing to levels that ensure access to care. The Exchange administers the affordability credits with other federal and state entities, such as local Social Security offices and state Medicaid agencies.
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Caps annual out‐of‐pocket spending. All new policies will cap annual out‐of‐pocket spending to prevent bankruptcies from medical expenses.
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Increased competition: The creation of the Health Insurance Exchange and the inclusion of a public health insurance option will make health insurance more affordable by opening many market areas in our country to new competition, spurring efficiency and transparency.
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Expands Medicaid. Individuals and families with incomes at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty level will be eligible for an expanded and improved Medicaid program. Recognizing the budget challenges in many states, this expansion will be fully federally financed. To improve provider participation in this vital safety net – particularly for low‐income children, individuals with disabilities and people with mental illnesses – reimbursement rates for primary care services will be increased with new federal funding.
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Improves Medicare. Senior citizens and people with disabilities will benefit from provisions that fill the donut hole over time in the Part D drug program, eliminate cost‐sharing for preventive services, improve the low‐income subsidy programs in Medicare, fix physician payments, and make other program improvements. The bill will also address future fiscal challenges by improving payment accuracy, encouraging delivery system reforms and extending solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund.
III. SHARED RESPONSIBILITY The bill creates shared responsibility among individuals, employers and government to ensure that all Americans have affordable coverage of essential health benefits.
􀂃
Individual responsibility. Except in cases of hardship, once market reforms and affordability credits are in effect, individuals will be responsible for obtaining and maintaining health insurance coverage. Those who choose to not obtain coverage will pay a penalty of 2.5 percent of modified adjusted gross income above a specified level.
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Employer responsibility. The proposal builds on the employer‐sponsored coverage that exists today. Employers will have the option of providing health insurance coverage for their workers or contributing funds on their behalf. Employers that choose to contribute will pay an amount based on eight percent of their payroll. Employers that choose to offer coverage must meet minimum benefit and contribution requirements specified in the proposal.
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Assistance for small employers. Recognizing the special needs of small businesses, the smallest businesses (payroll that does not exceed $250,000) are exempt from the employer responsibility requirement. The payroll penalty would then phase in starting at 2% for firms with annual payrolls over $250,000 rising to the full 8 percent penalty for firms with annual payrolls above $400,000. In addition, a new small business tax credit will be available for those firms who want to provide health coverage to their workers. In addition to the targeted assistance, the Exchange and market reforms provide a long‐sought opportunity for small businesses to benefit from a more organized, efficient marketplace in which to purchase coverage.
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Government responsibility. The government is responsible for ensuring that every American can afford quality health insurance, through the new affordability credits, insurance reforms, consumer protections, and improvements to Medicare and Medicaid.
IV. PREVENTION AND WELLNESS Prevention and wellness measures of the bill include:
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Expansion of Community Health Centers;
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Prohibition of cost‐sharing for preventive services;
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Creation of community‐based programs to deliver prevention and wellness services;
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A focus on community‐based programs and new data collection efforts to better identify and address racial, ethnic, regional and other health disparities;
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Funds to strengthen state, local, tribal and territorial public health departments and programs.
V. WORKFORCE INVESTMENTS The bill expands the health care workforce through:
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Increased funding for the National Health Service Corp;
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More training of primary care doctors and an expansion of the pipeline of individuals going into health professions, including primary care, nursing and public health;
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Greater support for workforce diversity;
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Expansion of scholarships and loans for individuals in needed professions and shortage areas;
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Encouragement of training of primary care physicians by taking steps to increase physician training outside the hospital, where most primary care is delivered, and redistributes unfilled graduate medical education residency slots for purposes of training more primary care physicians. The proposal also improves accountability for graduate medical education funding to ensure that physicians are trained with the skills needed to practice health care in the 21st century.
VI. CONTROLLING COSTS The bill will reduce the growth in health care spending in a numerous ways. Investing in health care through stronger prevention and wellness measures, increasing access to primary care, health care delivery system reform, the Health Insurance Exchange and the public health insurance option, improvements in payment accuracy and reforms to Medicare and Medicaid will all help slow the growth of health care costs over time. These savings will accrue to families, employers, and taxpayers.
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Modernization and improvement of Medicare. The bill implements major delivery system reform in Medicare to reward efficient provision of health care, rolling out innovative concepts such as accountable care organizations, medical homes, and bundling of acute and post‐acute provider payments. New payment incentives aim to decrease preventable hospital readmissions, expanding this policy over time to recognize that physicians and post‐acute providers also play an important role in avoiding readmissions. The bill improves the Medicare Part D program by creating new consumer protections for Medicare Advantage Plans, eliminating the “donut hole” and improving
low‐income subsidy programs, so that Medicare is affordable for all seniors and other eligible individuals. A centerpiece of the proposal is a complete reform of the flawed physician payment mechanism in Medicare (the so‐called sustainable growth rate or “SGR” formula), with an update that wipes away accumulated deficits, provides for a fresh start, and rewards primary care services, care coordination and efficiency.
􀂃
Innovation and delivery reform through the public health insurance option. The public health insurance option will be empowered to implement innovative delivery reform initiatives so that it is a nimble purchaser of health care and gets more value for each health care dollar. It will expand upon the experiments put forth in Medicare and be provided the flexibility to implement value‐based purchasing, accountable care organizations, medical homes, and bundled payments. These features will ensure the public option is a leader in efficient delivery of quality care, spurring competition with private plans.
􀂃
Improving payment accuracy and eliminating overpayments. The bill eliminates overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans and improves payment accuracy for numerous other providers, following recommendations by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and the President. These steps will extend Medicare Trust Fund solvency, and put Medicare on stronger financial footing for the future.
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Preventing waste, fraud and abuse. New tools will be provided to combat waste, fraud and abuse within the entire health care system. Within Medicare, new authorities allow for pre‐enrollment screening of providers and suppliers, permit designation of certain areas as being at elevated risk of fraud to implement enhanced oversight, and require compliance programs of providers and suppliers. The new public health insurance option and Health Insurance Exchange will build upon the safeguards and best practices gleaned from experience in other areas.
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Administrative simplification. The bill will simplify the paperwork burden that adds tremendous costs and hassles for patients, providers, and businesses today.
PREPARED BY THE HOUSE COMMITTEES ON WAYS AND MEANS, ENERGY AND COMMERCE, AND EDUCATION AND LABOR JULY 14, 2009

AAHCA-BILLSUMMARY-071409.pdf (application/pdf Object)

2009-08-27T00:32:00.001-05:00

Folks. The wingnuts only know what they are told about what is in the Health Care Reform legislation. They are afraid someone is going to get something free. Actually, most of the legislation is about helping people who already have health insurance. Please read Teddy Kennedy's Affordable Choices Health Care Act.

AAHCA-BILLSUMMARY-071409.pdf (application/pdf Object)

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kennedy-and-dodd-dear-colleague.pdf (application/pdf Object)

2009-08-27T00:19:00.001-05:00

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Comparision of Health Care Systems and Health

2009-08-11T16:09:00.001-05:00

Country	Life expectancy	Infant mortality rate	Physicians per 1000 people	Nurses per 1000 people	Per capita expenditure on health (USD)	Healthcare costs as a percent of GDP	% of government revenue spent on health	% of health costs paid by government
Australia	81.1	4.7	2.8	9.7	2,999	8.8	17.7	67.0
Canada	80.4	5.4	2.1	8.8	3,678	10.1	16.7	70.0
France	80.9	4.0	3.4	7.6	3,449	11.1	14.2	79.7
Germany	79.8	3.8	3.5	9.8	3,371	10.6	17.6	77.0
Japan	82.4	2.8	2.1	9.3	2,474	8.2	16.8	82.7
Sweden	80.8	2.8	3.5	10.7	3,202	9.2	13.6	81.7
UK	79.1	5.0	2.5	11.9	2,760	8.4	15.8	87.0
US	77.8	6.9	2.4	10.5	6,714	16.0	18.5	46.0

Fake Protests Funded By the GOP and Corporations.

2009-08-05T16:24:00.001-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The CorporateFacist Are Up To Their DIrty Tricks Still.

2009-06-08T15:50:00.002-05:00

I heard about this nutjob Neocon letter on the Thom Hartmann Show. It is full of slander and lies. Don't buy his soap. Boycott Procter and Gamble. Shining light on lies is the best disenfectant.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA - The Conservative Underground: "AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me. Change Management

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core..

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America ' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years."

Lou Pritchett is one of corporate America 's acclaimed Right Wing authors. Pritchett started as a soap salesman and became Vice-President, Sales and Customer Development for Procter and Gamble.

Ventura Wants Obama To Prosecute the Torturers.

2009-05-28T21:54:00.003-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Media Matters - The Limbaugh Wire for 04/14/2009

2009-04-15T20:03:00.000-05:00

Limbaugh Hates America.

Media Matters - The Limbaugh Wire for 04/14/2009: "Hour 2: Limbaugh: Obama wouldn't have given order to shoot if he'd known 'the three Somali community organizers were actually young, black Muslim teenagers'

Published Tue, Apr 14, 2009 2:44pm ET

This hour of the Limbaugh Wire brought to you by Rush's tortured take on 24's environmentalism
By Simon Maloy

Rush got the second hour rolling by pointing out that we learned just today that the Somali pirates that held Captain Phillips hostage were teenagers. Based on this, Rush said: 'Now, just imaging the hue and cry had a Republican president ordered added the shooting of black teenagers on the high seas.' We weren't sure exactly what he was getting at here, but Rush continued in this vein, noting that on Fox News' Special Report last night, Mort Kondracke said that Obama did the right thing with regard to the pirates, and that he was in church with the president on Sunday, who looked 'preoccupied.' Rush said the reason Obama looked 'preoccupied' was that 'he was worried about the order he had given to wipe out three teenagers on the high seas. Black Muslim teenagers.' Rush also added that Obama might have been 'confused about why there was nobody screaming about how evil America was.'

Coming back from the break, Rush helpfully explained his comments from the top of the hour -- if George W. Bush had ordered pirates shot, that evil mainstream media would have reported that Bush ordered the killing of three black teenagers on the high seas. That seems perfectly likely to us. Rush then suspected that pirates had already infiltrated the U.S., reading from a story about how two men died in a sword fight in Indiana. But it turned out that the sword used was from World War II-era Japan, so Rush's theory went out the window."

Is America Weighed Down By 'Dead Ideas'? : NPR

2009-02-15T19:29:00.002-06:00

Is America Weighed Down By 'Dead Ideas'? : NPR

Is America Weighed Down By 'Dead Ideas'?

Listen Now [4 min 37 sec] add to playlist

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Salvador Farfan

Matt Miller is a columnist for Fortune and the host of the radio program Left, Right and Center.

Salvador Farfan

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas
By Matt Miller
Times Books
Hardcover, 282 pages
List Price: $25

Read an excerpt.

Morning Edition, February 9, 2009 · If an entire culture can be said to be hung up on the past, then author Matt Miller might be the nation's therapist. His message to America: Just let go.

"The problem we're in now as an economy is that we're trapped in old ways of thinking," Miller tells Morning Edition guest host Linda Wertheimer.

In his new book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Miller writes that while many of our current notions of economic and social well-being made sense when they first gained traction 50 years ago, they don't hold much water today. On the list of outmoded beliefs: the ideas that our children will earn more than we do; that free trade is good; that financial markets can regulate themselves; that taxes are bad; and that the company we work for should provide us with health care and pensions.

"Unless we explode the dead ideas I'm talking about in the book, we won't find our way back to a durable prosperity," warns Miller.

Take health care: Miller argues that the current employer-based health care system hurts businesses and leaves too many people uninsured or under-insured. Instead, he believes government should share more of the cost of health care.

"We're the only country that does things this way," he says, referring to the employer-based health care system. "We're going to need to revisit the role of the government versus the role of private corporations in assuring the kind of prosperity we want."

Miller admits that increased government involvement in health care and other services will require a hike in taxes. But, he says, as the baby boom generation retires, taxes are likely to go up anyway. And so now may be the time to "tax ourselves more smartly ... [by] cutting taxes on things like payrolls, which hurt lower-income workers and kill jobs, and raising taxes on dirty energy, which we want to cut back on because of our environmental goals."

While raising taxes is never a popular idea, Miller says the time is right: "People are ready for a more honest conversation on this because they know now how serious the stakes are."

While current thinking about the American economy is hardly monolithic, the individuals who occupy its most influential positions subscribe to certain key premises:

our children will earn more than we do
free trade is "good" no matter how many people it hurts
employers should play a central role in the provision of health coverage
taxes hurt the economy
"local control" of schools is essential
people tend to end up, in economic terms, where they deserve to

The Stimulus Plan: A Detailed List of Spending - ProPublica

2009-02-15T08:04:00.000-06:00

Go to link below for itemized list for the Stimulus Plan. --Lee

The Stimulus Plan: A Detailed List of Spending - ProPublica: "The Stimulus Plan: A Detailed List of Spending

by Michael Grabell and Christopher Weaver, ProPublica - February 13, 2009 10:24 am EST"

Ashley Judd slams Sarah Palin for ‘promoting aerial killing of wolves’

2009-02-03T22:03:00.001-06:00

You Go Ashley! --Lee
Ashley Judd slams Sarah Palin for 'promoting aerial killing of wolves' | Top News

Ashley Judd

slams Sarah Palin for 'promoting aerial killing of wolves'

Submitted by Kiran Pahwa on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 08:02.

Washington, Feb 03 : Ashley Judd has teamed-up with Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund to launch a Web-based campaign targeting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's `anti-conservation agenda' and `attack on wolves and bears'.

The organisation has launched the campaign with a new Website, EyeonPalin. org.

In a video, the actress condemns Palin for allegedly promoting the aerial killing of wolves in Alaska, and goes so far as to accuse Palin of proposing bounties for severed forelegs of killed wolves.

"It is time to stop Sarah Palin and stop this senseless savagery," Politico. com quoted Judd, as stating in the ad.

While the launching the anti-Palin campaign, Judd said she is `outraged by Sarah Palin''s promotion of this cruel, unscientific and senseless practice which has no place in modern America.'

"Because she is apparently determined to continue and expand this horrific program, I am grateful that Defenders will aggressively fight to stop her. I am proud to be a part of that effort," Judd said.

This isn't the first time Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, a progressive environmental organization, has taken aim at Palin over the aerial killings.

During the presidential campaign, Defenders launched a national television ad campaign focused on the topic. (ANI)

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Darwin's twin track: 'Evolution and emancipation

2009-02-01T08:33:00.004-06:00

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Darwin's twin track: 'Evolution and emancipation'

Darwin's twin track: 'Evolution and emancipation'

What drove Charles Darwin to his extraordinary ideas on evolution and human origins? Adrian Desmond, with co-author James Moore, argue in a new book that the great scientist had a "sacred cause": the abolition of slavery.

A powerful symbol (Courtesy of the trustees of the Wedgwood Museum)

"It makes one's blood boil," said Charles Darwin.

Not much outraged the gentle recluse, but the horrors of slavery could cost him a night's sleep.He was thinking of the whipped house boy and the thumbscrews used by old ladies in South America, atrocities he had witnessed on the Beagle voyage.The screams stayed with him for life, but how much did they influence his life's work?Today you can still read of Darwin's "eureka" moment when he saw the Galapagos finches.Alas, his conversion to evolution wasn't so simple, but it was much more interesting. It didn't occur in the Galapagos, but probably on his arrival home.

And new evidence suggests that Darwin's unique approach to evolution - relating all races and species by "common descent" - could have been fostered by his anti-slavery beliefs.

Family feelings

After circumnavigating the globe (1831-6), Darwin settled in London. Here in 1838 he formulated his theory of "natural selection", after which he became increasingly reclusive, particularly following his move to Down village in Kent.

He refrained from publishing a word on evolution until 1858 - not even a brief, priority-grabbing paper, as was his way with other projects. His hesitance is understandable. Evolution was execrable to his Cambridge friends.

BBC'S DARWIN SEASON

The Genius of Evolution

One naturalist called it "abominable trash vomited" out by revolutionaries; and radicals did, indeed, deploy a self-sustaining evolution to undermine the creationist miracles on which Anglican power rested.

Darwin's gouty Cambridge professor, Adam Sedgwick, used "contempt, scorn, and ridicule" to trash one "filthy" evolution book in 1844. Darwin, sensitive about his reputation, wisely laid low.

So why devise such a beastly theory in the first place, if it threatened ignominy? Was there some integral moral gain?

Consider another question. Why was Darwin's evolution uniquely defined by common descent, the joining of races and species through shared ancestry? Darwin's common descent image is so obvious today that we forget to question where it came from.

'Man and brother'

Common descent in Darwin's younger day was ubiquitous in anti-slavery tracts. Consider the words of the famous cameo, depicting a kneeling slave asking "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" That cameo was in fact the brainchild of the pottery-dynasty founder, Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's grandfather.

New evidence shows how indebted Darwin was to this anti-slavery heritage.

Darwin knew that going into print would have invited derision

Darwin's uncle Jos Wedgwood sold the firm's London showroom, and ploughed the proceeds into an anti-slavery society, and in the 1850s (with American slavery still flourishing) the Wedgwoods continued using labels showing the slave under Britannia's banner, which read "God Hath Made of One Blood All Nations of Men".

The anti-slavery agitator Thomas Clarkson - the man who rode 35,000 miles collecting statistics in the sea ports on the evil trade - was another bankrolled by Josiah Wedgwood.

With a Wedgwood wife and mother, Darwin saw abolition as a "sacred cause" too, and in his culminating work, the Descent of Man (1871), he placed Clarkson at the moral apex of humanity and called slavery a "great sin".

Such family feelings explain why, as a 16-year-old at Edinburgh University in 1826 (in a period often dismissed by historians), Darwin could spend 40 extra-curricular hours with a freed slave from Guyana studying taxidermy and become his "intimate" friend.

And this when many visiting Americans saw any black/white friendship as "revolting".

Torture accounts

Darwin witnessed slavery everywhere in South America. The Beagle's own supply ship on her previous trip had originally been a slaver, and, once sold, it reverted to slaving. While Darwin was on the continent, it was again disgorging chained Africans.

Darwin's journal of the voyage (1845) gives a damning account of the tortures he saw or heard of; but of all the "heart-sickening atrocities", the worst for him were the stories of masters threatening to sell the children of disobedient slaves.

Darwin was appalled at the treatment handed out to slaves

As an outsider, he was "powerless as a child even to remonstrate". But within weeks of the Beagle's return, he developed a science which undercut the slave-master's notions.

Many plantation owners considered slaves a separate species, an animal to be exploited as such. Blacks and whites shared no joint ancestry.

Yet the Darwin-Wedgwood maxim made the slave a "Man and a Brother". Darwin opened his first evolution notebook in 1837, damned slave-holders for their separate species view, then pushed common parentage to the zoological limit.

Since species were only extended races, they too must share an ancestry. He moved from talking of the common "father" of mankind to an "opossum"-like fossil as the father of all mammals.

Human genealogy became the model for his famous "tree of life".

Fossil evidence

None of this minimizes the importance of Darwin's Galapagos and Pampas observations. The giant tortoises, mockingbirds and finches varied from island to island, and this became clearer to Darwin after London Zoo's bird expert John Gould analysed his finches in January 1837.

Then Richard Owen (the man shortly to give the world the "dinosaurs") diagnosed Darwin's fossils. Darwin thought that some were "rhinos" (Old World mammals), yet Owen showed that they were indigenous giant armadillos, sloths and anteaters.

So extinct animals were being succeeded by related living types. This evidence remains crucial, but it was the way Darwin marshalled it that concerns us. Assuming the tacit truth of racial "brotherhood" allowed him to join the bloodlines into a common descent configuration.

And he did so in 1837-8, just as the West Indies slaves were being released (technically freed in 1833, they were forced to serve an "apprenticeship" which effectively kept them in bondage till 1838).

This freedom filled Darwin with a sense of pride and he declared that "we... have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin". He certainly had.

All too clear

His common descent imagery was unknown elsewhere in natural history, beyond racially unifying works such as James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Mankind. That book traced animal races to common ancestors in order to prove that all humans could have descended from Adam.

Darwin, preparing to write the Origin of Species, scribbled inside his copy of Prichard: "How like my Book all this will be". It wasn't so. He remained a worried man and in the later 1850s dropped humans from his publishing plans because the subject was "so surrounded with prejudices".

But even though the Origin of Species (1859) skirted people, no one doubted that they remained at its core.

Darwin's "bulldog" T.H. Huxley, who took over the fight for human evolution, said that when it came to uniting black and white ancestries, he "was pleased to be able to show that Mr Darwin was for once on the side of orthodoxy".

Darwin could have wished for no more.

Adrian Desmond is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Biology Department at University College London. He is co-author with James Moore of Darwin's Sacred Cause (Allen Lane)

The Clean Coal Myth

2009-02-01T08:16:00.000-06:00

Unmasking the truth behind "clean coal"

A villager from Mae Moh joins the protest at the heavily guarded entrance of the APEC Clean Coal meeting venue in Lampang province, 600 kms north of Bangkok.

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“Clean coal” is an attempt by the coal industry to try and make itself relevant in the age of renewables.

What is (so-called) “clean coal”?

Coal is a highly polluting energy source. It emits much more carbon per unit of energy than oil, and natural gas. CO2 represents the major portion of greenhouse gases. It is, therefore, one of the leading contributors to climate change. From mine to sky, from extraction to combustion -- coal pollutes every step of the way. The huge environmental and social costs associated with coal usage make it an expensive option for developing countries. From acid drainage from coal mines, polluting rivers and streams, to the release of mercury and other toxins when it is burned, as well as climate-destroying gases and fine particulates that wreak havoc on human health, COAL is unquestionably, a DIRTY BUSINESS.

It is a major contributor to climate change – the biggest environmental threat we face. It is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, emitting 29% more than oil, 80% more carbon dioxide (the main driver of climate change) per unit of energy than gas.

Mercury is a particular problem. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), mercury and its compounds are highly toxic and pose a ‘global environmental threat to humans and wildlife.’ Coal-fired power and heat production are the largest single source of atmospheric mercury emissions. There are no commercially available technologies to prevent mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.

“Clean coal” is the industry’s attempt to “clean up” its dirty image – the industry’s greenwash buzzword. It is not a new type of coal.

“Clean coal” technology (CCT) refers to technologies intended to reduce pollution. But no coal-fired power plants are truly ‘clean’.

“Clean coal” methods only move pollutants from one waste stream to another which are then still released into the environment. Any time coal is burnt, contaminants are released and they have to go somewhere. They can be released via the fly ash, the gaseous air emissions, water outflow or the ash left at the bottom after burning. Ultimately, they still end up polluting the environment.

“Clean coal” methods only move pollutants from one waste stream to another.

Communities after communities have lamented the hosting of coal-fired plants. They are often ignored due to governments' preference for polluting power plants yet they often bear the burden of adversely altered lives.

Despite over 10 years of research and $5.2 billion of investment in the US alone , scientists are still unable to make coal clean. The Australian government spends A$0.5 million annually to promote Australia’s ‘clean coal’ to the Asia Pacific region. “Clean coal” technologies are expensive and do nothing to mitigate the environmental effects of coal mining or the devastating effects of global warming. Furthermore, clean coal research risks diverting investment away from renewable energy, which is available to reduce greenhouse gas emissions now.

The first CCT programs were set up in the late 1980s in response to concerns over acid rain. The programs focused on reducing emissions of sulphur dioxide (SO2) and oxides of nitrogen (NOX), the primary causes of acid rain. Now the elusive promise of “clean coal” technology is being used to promote coal as an energy source.

A price worth paying?

Many of the ‘clean coal’ technologies being promoted by the coal industry are still in the development stage and will take hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars and many more years before they are commercially available. “Clean coal” technologies are also extremely expensive in terms of day to day running costs. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates the capital costs of a typical IGCC plant (an experimental low-emission coal power station) to be US$1,383/kW, $2,088/kW with carbon sequestration. This compares with US$1,015/kW for a typical wind farm.

Summary

“Clean coal” is an attempt by the coal industry to try and make itself relevant in the age of renewables. Existing CCTs do nothing to mitigate the environmental effects of coal mining or the devastating effects of global warming. Coal is the dirtiest fuel there is and belongs in the past. Much higher emission cuts can be made using currently available natural gas, wind and modern biomass that are already in widespread use. Clean, inexpensive. This is where investment should be directed, rather than squandering valuable resources on a dirty dinosaur.

Visit the links below to read more about 'clean coal':

Military-Industrial Complex Speech

2009-01-30T03:06:00.000-06:00

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with
our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may
prosper together. " --, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
full text:

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

Adam Smith The Theory of the Moral Sentiments 1759

2009-01-25T09:02:00.001-06:00

The father of Capitalism did not see it in the eutopian way we do today. Capitalism is simply an amoral financial system. It is not a philosophy of life. --Lee

Adam Smith
The Theory of the Moral Sentiments
1759

The poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich. He finds the cottage of his father too small for his accommodation, and fancies he should be lodged more at his ease in a palace. He is displeased with being obliged to walk a-foot, or to endure the fatigue of riding on horseback. He sees his superiors carried about in machines, and imagines that in one of these he could travel with less inconveniency. He feels himself naturally indolent, and willing to serve himself with his own hands as little as possible; and judges, that a numerous retinue of servants would save him from a great deal of trouble. He thinks if he had attained all these, he would sit still contentedly, and be quiet, enjoying himself in the thought of the happiness and tranquillity of his situation. He is enchanted with the distant idea of this felicity. It appears in his fancy like the life of some superior rank of beings, and, in order to arrive at it, he devotes himself for ever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness. To obtain the conveniencies which these afford, he submits in the first year, nay in the first month of his application, to more fatigue of body and more uneasiness of mind than he could have suffered through the whole of his life from the want of them. He studies to distinguish himself in some laborious profession. With the most unrelenting industry he labours night and day to acquire talents superior to all his competitors. He endeavours next to bring those talents into public view, and with equal assiduity solicits every opportunity of employment. For this purpose he makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it. It is then, in the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments which he imagines he has met with from the injustice of his enemies, or from the perfidy and ingratitude of his friends, that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tranquillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the lover of toys; and like them too, more troublesome to the person who carries them about with him than all the advantages they can afford him are commodious. There is no other real difference between them, except that the conveniencies of the one are somewhat more observable than those of the other. The palaces, the gardens, the equipage, the retinue of the great, are objects of which the obvious conveniency strikes every body. They do not require that their masters should point out to us wherein consists their utility. Of our own accord we readily enter into it, and by sympathy enjoy and thereby applaud the satisfaction which they are fitted to afford him. But the curiosity of a tooth-pick, of an ear-picker, of a machine for cutting the nails, or of any other trinket of the same kind, is not so obvious Their conveniency may perhaps be equally great, but it is not so striking, and we do not so readily enter into the satisfaction of the man who possesses them. They are therefore less reasonable subjects of vanity than the magnificence of wealth and greatness; and in this consists the sole advantage of these last. They more effectually gratify that love of distinction so natural to man. To one who was to live alone in a desolate island it might be a matter of doubt, perhaps, whether a palace, or a collection of such small conveniencies as are commonly contained in a tweezer-case, would contribute most to his happiness and enjoyment. If he is to live in society, indeed, there can be no comparison, because in this, as in all other cases, we constantly pay more regard to the sentiments of the spectator, than to those of the person principally concerned, and consider rather how his situation will appear to other people, than how it will appear to himself. If we examine, however, why the spectator distinguishes with such admiration the condition of the rich and the great, we shall find that it is not so much upon account of the superior ease or pleasure which they are supposed to enjoy, as of the numberless artificial and elegant contrivances for promoting this ease or pleasure. He does not even imagine that they are really happier than other people: but he imagines that they possess more means of happiness. And it is the ingenious and artful adjustment of those means to the end for which they were intended, that is the principal source of his admiration. But in the languor of disease and the weariness of old age, the pleasures of the vain and empty distinctions of greatness disappear. To one, in this situation, they are no longer capable of recommending those toilsome pursuits in which they had formerly engaged him. In his heart he curses ambition, and vainly regrets the ease and the indolence of youth, pleasures which are fled for ever, and which he has foolishly sacrificed for what, when he has got it, can afford him no real satisfaction. In this miserable aspect does greatness appear to every man when reduced either by spleen or disease to observe with attention his own situation, and to consider what it is that is really wanting to his happiness. Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor. They are immense fabrics, which it requires the labour of a life to raise, which threaten every moment to overwhelm the person that dwells in them, and which while they stand, though they may save him from some smaller inconveniencies, can protect him from none of the severer inclemencies of the season. They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death.

Only Morons Listen To This Idiot.

2009-01-24T23:58:00.000-06:00

A Play About Shells for Gaza Children - NYTimes.com

2009-01-24T14:24:00.001-06:00

A Play About Shells for Gaza Children - NYTimes.com

A Play About Shells for Gaza Children

By ETHAN BRONNER

Published: January 24, 2009

GAZA — The boys clapped and sang to pulsating music. They played games and shouted. It could have been a group activity at any school in any place, but this was the middle school in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza, near where the United Nations says some 40 people were killed by Israeli mortar fire earlier this month.

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Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesRuins and Resumption Residents returned to their homes around Gaza City on Friday.

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Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesOn Saturday, children were back in school in the Jabaliya camp.

Saturday was the first day of school since before the war, and 1,000 homeless people had been removed from the building so that classes could begin.

Even then, normal schoolwork had to wait. A team trained in trauma and group activities was running the assembly, and after the singing and clapping, there was a play devoted to how to handle dangerous materials, like shell parts, still in or near homes. Later, each pupil described what had happened to him and to his friends and family in Israel's 23-day war aimed at stopping Hamas's rockets.

"They are not ready to learn yet," said Asem Bajah, an English teacher, as he watched the singing. "And I am not ready to teach."

One week after the war with Israel and Hamas stopped — each side declaring a unilateral cease-fire — Gaza remains in a kind of stupor. There are numbers, of course, to describe its misery — 4,000 homes destroyed, 21,000 badly damaged, 100,000 people homeless, according to several aid agencies — but they do not tell the full story.

full article here: A Play About Shells for Gaza Children - NYTimes.com

Bye, Bye, Bush!

2009-01-22T23:38:00.001-06:00

"'To lock people into a war zone is something that evokes the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto..."

2009-01-22T13:45:00.000-06:00

UN investigator sees evidence of war crimes in Gaza | International | Reuters:

By Jonathan Lynn

GENEVA, Jan 22 (Reuters) - There is evidence that Israel committed war crimes during its 22-day campaign in the Gaza Strip and there should be an independent inquiry, U.N. investigator Richard Falk said on Thursday.

The mental anguish of the civilians who suffered the assault is so great that the entire population of Gaza could be seen as casualties, said Falk, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Falk, speaking by phone from his home in California, said compelling evidence that Israel's actions in Gaza violated international humanitarian law required an independent investigation into whether they amounted to war crimes.

"I believe that there is the prima facie case for reaching that conclusion," he told a Geneva news conference.

Falk said Israel had made no effort to allow civilians to escape the fighting.

"'To lock people into a war zone is something that evokes the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto, and sieges that occur unintentionally during a period of wartime,' Falk, who is Jewish, said, referring to the starvation and murder of Warsaw's Jews by Nazi Germany in World War Two."

Barack Berry

2009-01-22T12:19:00.000-06:00

Ron Reagan: Chinese Officials Gag Obama

2009-01-22T08:33:00.003-06:00

Ron Reagan: Chinese Officials Gag Obama

Published on Air America Media (http://airamerica.com)

China: the worst combination of Maoism and Capitalism. Boycott Chinese Goods! --Lee

Ron Reagan: Chinese Officials Gag Obama

Chinese Officials Gag Obama

China kept a close eye on Barack Obama's inauguration speech on Tuesday. As the translated version of his speech aired, the audio cut out when President Obama mentioned communism and fascism. CCTV cut to an anchor, unbeknownst to her at first, to ask an analyst questions as Obama was speaking.

Source URL: http://airamerica.com/blog/2009/jan/21/chinese-officials-gag-obama

BE THE CHANGE

2009-01-22T08:12:00.002-06:00

bethechange.jpg (JPEG Image, 366x550 pixels)

"Antarctica Heating Up, 'Ignored' Satellite Data Show

2009-01-21T20:51:00.001-06:00

Anne Minard
for National Geographic News
January 21, 2009

Temperatures are warming throughout Antarctica, especially in winter and spring, according to new weather station and satellite data.

The evidence contradicts studies showing that only the Antarctic Peninsula was warming while the rest of the continent has cooled.

The previous data has, in a least one case, fueled skepticism about global warming.

The new study also reveals that western Antarctica may actually be warming faster than the Antarctic Peninsula, 'the biggest surprise' to study lead author Eric Steig, a climate researcher at the University of Washington.

'We can't say this with confidence, but our results at least hint that that may be the case.'

Previous papers had already hinted at warming in eastern Antarctica, Steig said.

The Antarctic Peninsula, the farthest portion of the continent from the South Pole, has warmed faster than any other place in the world in the past 50 years—by some estimates as much as 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 degrees Celsius).

Such increases have caused dramatic ice shelf collapses.

(Related: 'Antarctica Ice Loss Faster Than Ten Years Ago' [November 4, 2008].)

Steig also emphasized that the huge continent remains a complicated place, with both warming and cooling trends varying with geography and season.

Forest for the Trees

Steig and his team were conducting climate studies from ice cores in western Antarctica and needed up-to-date data for comparison.

With no permanent research stations, the scientists lacked reliable long-term records, Steig said.

'We recognized that to get an idea of what was happening in western Antarctica, we would have to rely on using weather station data from other parts of Antarctica.'

Because weather stations are so sparse, past studies relied weighted averages, for the missing areas that are based on temperatures from surrounding locales.

'In our case, we recognized that there was a better way to [connect data] between weather stations in Antarctica, which was to use satellite data,' said Steig, whose results appear in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

The team combined spotty weather station records and satellite data between 1957 and 2006.

'In retrospect, it is pretty obvious that ignoring the satellite data, as others had done, was really missing the forest for the trees,' Steig said.

The researchers found that the temperature over western Antarctica is rising 0.31 Fahrenheit (0.17 degree Celsius) per decade, with a continental increase of 0.18 Fahrenheit (0.1 degree Celsius).

Worldwide, the temperature has climbed an average of 1.08 Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) over the past 50 years, said study co-author Drew Shindell of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science.

A hole in the ozone layer over eastern Antarctica drives winds that help keep temperatures down, but that effect is likely to lessen as the layer heals, leading to still more warming, Shindell added.

About Face

In 2002, Peter Doran, an earth and environmental scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published results that showed more parts of Antarctica than not were cooling.

But Doran wrote a 2007 op-ed in the New York Times lamenting that his earlier study had been cited by global warming skeptics, including the late Michael Crichton in his 2004 novel State of Fear.

(Get fast facts on global warming.)

Doran also wrote that more weather stations on Antarctica and longer-term data would be needed to demonstrate a clear trend in Antarctica.

This week, Doran called the new Nature paper 'an excellent and thorough study by a top-notch group.'

'First, they have brought in a combination of data sources and added another decade and a half to what we reported on. The argument for an expanded warming in [western] Antarctica based on this seems reasonable.'

Continued satellite measurements, more weather stations, and core samples to reconstruct historic temperatures are all needed to complete the Antarctic climate picture, Steig said.

© 1996-2008 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved."

Tell Obama: Clean Coal Is A MYTH.

2009-01-21T14:51:00.000-06:00

Tons of Coal Ash Piling Up Across U.S., Analysis Says: "Tons of Coal Ash Piling Up Across U.S., Analysis Says

Associated Press
Saturday, January 10, 2009; A02

Millions of tons of toxic coal ash is piling up in power plant ponds in 32 states, a situation the U.S. government has long recognized as a risk to human health and the environment but has done nothing about.

An Associated Press analysis of the most recent Energy Department data found that 156 coal-fired power plants store ash in surface ponds similar to one that ruptured last month in Tennessee. Yesterday, a pond at a northeastern Alabama power plant spilled a different material -- water laced with calcium sulfate, a component of a material known as gypsum -- and some lawmakers said the incident was more evidence that Congress needs to overhaul coal waste regulations.

'One disaster convinced me that we ought to subject coal ash impoundments to federal design, construction and inspection requirements,' said Rep. Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. 'But two incidents in less than three weeks at a TVA site illustrate that we must act swiftly if we hope to ensure a basic level safety for our communities and the environment.'

The man-made lagoons hold a mixture of the noncombustible ingredients of coal and the ash trapped by equipment designed to reduce air pollution from the power plants.

Over the years, the volume of waste has grown as demand for electricity has increased and the federal government has further restricted emissions from power plants.

The Environmental Protection Agency eight years ago said it wanted to set a national standard for ponds or landfills used to dispose of wastes produced from burning coal. The agency has yet to act.

As a result, coal ash ponds are subject to less regulation than landfills accepting household trash, even though the industry's own estimates show that ash ponds contain tens of thousands of pounds of toxic heavy metals."

TRANSCRIPT: Obama's Inaugural Address

2009-01-20T21:46:00.000-06:00

TRANSCRIPT: Obama's Inaugural Address: "FULL TRANSCRIPT: President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address
President Barack Obama Delivers Inaugural Address at US Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Jan. 20, 2009

Full transcript as prepared for delivery of President Barack Obama's inaugural remarks on Jan. 20, 2009, at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

My fellow citizens:

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many.

They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages.

We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed - why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

'Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].'

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures"

'Air and Simple Gifts' John Williams at Obama Inauguration

2009-01-20T19:16:00.000-06:00

Yo-Yo Ma , Itzhak Perlman , Anthony McGill & Gabriela Montero
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free, 'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, 'Twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gain'd, To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd, To turn, turn will be our delight, Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Theres no one as Irish as Barack OBama- Corrigan Brothers

2009-01-20T18:26:00.000-06:00

"Air and Simple Gifts", composed by John Williams

2009-01-20T17:59:00.001-06:00

Yo-Yo Ma , Itzhak Perlman , Anthony McGill & Gabriela Montero at the Obama Inauguration

"Air and Simple Gifts", composed by John Williams

2009-01-20T17:59:00.000-06:00

Yo-Yo Ma , Itzhak Perlman , Anthony McGill & Gabriela Montero at the Obama Inauguration

"Simple Gifts" was written by Elder Joseph

2009-01-20T13:14:00.000-06:00

Listen to Copeland here.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,

'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

We Are Back!

2009-01-20T04:06:00.000-06:00

Gaza is dying

2009-01-15T18:09:00.002-06:00

Dear friends,

Spread the word - as the awful Gaza death toll passes 1000, our
Ceasefire Now petition is being delivered worldwide through ads, phone
calls, and meetings with world leaders. We urgently need to reach 1
million signatures this week, act now and forward this email:
Sign Ceasefire Petition,
see our US ads!

Gaza is dying -- the battle has moved deep into its cities, jam-packed
with 1.5 million civilians lacking food, medicine or water. President
Bush undermined Thursday's United Nations ceasefire resolution and
over 1000 people are now dead. The borders remain closed --
journalists can't get in, and desperate civilians can't get out.

But the global movement to end this war is building -- as we spread
the word the petition is at 430,000 signatures and rising, it has been
delivered to top leaders at the EU, UN and Arab League, our US members
are flooding their representatives with phone calls, and Avaaz members
worldwide have donated over $120,000 to an ad campaign in key
newspapers.

The pressure is working -- so we're ratcheting it up with hard-hitting
US ads pressing Barack Obama personally for an immediate change of
tack, face-to-face petition deliveries to European leaders this week
to get them to act, and working with Palestinians and Israelis to plan
bold actions on the ground. But every one of these actions becomes
stronger as more of us join the campaign. We need to reach 1 million
signatures this week -- thank you for signing the petition already,
let's all of us now take a moment to forward this email to all our
friends and family so they can join us and be heard:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace

Voices for a ceasefire are finally being heard in the Israeli cabinet
and media, Hamas is signalling it could accept a deal including
Turkish forces and EU monitors, but the sides are too far apart to end
this themselves.[3] That's why action by world powers is critical to
break the deadlock -- and global citizens' voices can make all the
difference if we raise an unstoppable voice calling on incoming
President Obama, the EU and Arab and Muslim states to guarantee a fair
and lasting ceasefire.

This week we are lobbying European and Muslim states for a more
effective international initiative to end the violence, protect
civilians on all sides and make normal life possible again in Gaza,
while reaching out to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon who is in the
Middle East working for a deal (we met him last year to deliver our
food crisis campaign). Meanwhile we're challenging contacts on both
sides to think creatively and accept a fair, internationally-overseen
agreement.

We've already run member-funded ads in the influential Washington Post
and Roll Call, the US Congress newspaper -- on the day of his
inauguration this coming Tuesday, we will press Barack Obama to
abandon Bush's failed policies and act immediately to end this war,
using his own words alongside hard facts to make the case in ads, US
media debates and directly lobbying his team.

It's amazing what we can do when hundreds of thousands of us come
together arond the world -- and if we raise our efforts to another
level this week, we could help to finally end the Gaza horror. Follow
the link below to take the first step by signing the petition, then
spread the word so others can do the same:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace

With hope and determination,

Paul, Graziela, Alice, Ricken, Luis, Brett, Ben, Iain, Paula,
Veronique, Milena and the whole Avaaz team

P.S. For a report on some of Avaaz's other campaigns so far, see:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/report_back_2

Sources:

1. "White House behind US volte-face on ceasefire call":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/09/gaza-us-security-council-abstention

"Israeli PM Ehud Olmert claims to be able to order Bush around":
http://www.juancole.com/2009/01/israeli-pm-ehud-olmert-claims-to-be.html

2. Washington Post: Israelis Push to Edge of Gaza City:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/11/AR2009011100616.html

3. Haaretz, "Olmert ignoring calls from Barak, Livni for immediate Gaza truce":
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055214.html

Other Voice - Sderot and Gaza residents calling for a ceasefire:
http://www.othervoice.org/welcome-eng.htm

On Hamas acceptance of a Turkish force, first reported in the Arabic
Al-Hayat newspaper, see:
http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/domestic/10771766.asp?scr=1

"Gaza bloodshed continues despite UN calls for ceasefire", 9 January 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/09/gaza-fighting-un-ceasefire

"Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?" (6 January 2009) is a
statistical analysis by an MIT professor, based on Israel's own data
for rocket fire (which it shows stopped for four months) and on which
side struck first. It provides useful factual background for how the
Israel-Hamas truce effectively collapsed in November well before it
expired (facts poorly reflected in some news reporting):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-kanwisher/reigniting-violence-how-d_b_155611.html

International Crisis Group's Ending the War in Gaza report (5 January 2009):
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5838&l=1

This Rasmussen Reports poll from the US is of interest: Only 31% of
Democrats support offensive, most prefer a diplomatic solution:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/americans_closely_divided_over_israel_s_gaza_attacks

"Gaza: outlines of an endgame", Ghassan Khatib (6 January 2009)
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/gaza-outlines-of-an-endgame

Jerusalem Post: "Israel must get out of Gaza now", 8 January 2009:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1231167305710&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Reuters: "Hamas seeks truce but says lifting siege a must" (5 January
2009) http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L5111105.htm

The US Army War College has just released a substantial report
supporting the view that Hamas can and must be brought into
negotiations and is capable of sustaining a long-term truce, or even
peace with Israel. Linked via:
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/node/10703

The inside story of the civil strife between Fatah and Hamas and the
Bush administration's involvement in this debacle is best-told in The
Gaza Bombshell, an investigative article published in the leading US
magazine Vanity Fair in April 2008:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804

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

ABOUT AVAAZ Avaaz.org is an independent, not-for-profit global
campaigning organization that works to ensure that the views and
values of the world's people inform global decision-making. (Avaaz
means "voice" in many languages.) Avaaz receives no money from
governments or corporations, and is staffed by a global team based in
Ottawa, London, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Buenos Aires, and Geneva.
Call us at: +1 888 922 8229 or +55 21 2509 0368 Click here to learn
more about our largest campaigns. Don't forget to check out our
Facebook and Myspace and Bebo pages!

Peace Is Patriotic.

2009-01-15T17:01:00.000-06:00

A 'torrent' of refugees raise concerns of a broader Gaza war - International Herald Tribune

2009-01-13T09:21:00.001-06:00

A 'torrent' of refugees raise concerns of a broader Gaza war - International Herald Tribune

An explosion after an Israeli air strike in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Tuesday. (Ibraheem Abu Mustafa /Reuters)

A 'torrent' of refugees raise concerns of a broader Gaza war

By Taghreed El-Khodary and Sabrina Tavernise

Published: January 13, 2009

GAZA: Growing numbers of Palestinians are fleeing their homes for makeshift shelters in schools, office buildings and a park as the Israeli Army continues to press its military campaign deeper into the city of Gaza.

According to the United Nations, about 30,000 people are living in schools it sponsors, and an estimated 60,000 have fled to the houses of relatives. The figures represent a small part of Gaza's 1.5 million population but have doubled in the past four days, UN officials said, raising concerns about the humanitarian impact of a broader war.

"What began as very small, isolated numbers is now turning into a torrent," said Aidan O'Leary, deputy director for the UN agency that deals with Palestinian refugees.

Major Jacob Dalal, an Israeli military spokesman, said units used leaflets to warn families to leave areas where they planned to operate.

Aid officials say that with Gaza's borders closed, choices for shelters in the 360-square-kilometer, or 140-square-mile, strip are slim and not completely safe. Last week, as many as 43 people were killed at a UN school by an Israeli mortar fired, the military said, in response to a Hamas attack. The Israeli military disputes the death toll.

Multimedia

Photographs

As fighting continues, refugees mount
» View

Photos: Conflict in Gaza, Day 18
» View

Aid groups have been pointing to what they say is a growing number of refugees. When Israeli soldiers moved deeper into the Zeitoun neighborhood on Sunday night, Olfat Jaawanah decided she had had enough. Shrapnel flew through a window, wounding her son, Ali, she said, and on Monday morning, she gathered a few blankets and moved her nine children out of their large house.

The nearby UN school was full - its bare classrooms packed with families and its toilets fetid - so she brought her family instead to her husband's office, a building belonging to an international organization in the center of Gaza, the strip's main city.

According to O'Leary, about a third of the agency's 91 schools are now full.

"Explosions, rockets," she said, arranging her children's clothes. "We can't take it anymore."

Movement is complicated by the confusion over when it is safe to leave. When the Abu Hajaj family received a leaflet last weekend, they took it as a sign of safe passage.

But Majad Abdel Karim Abu Hajaj, a teacher at a UN school, said his mother and sister were killed as they walked holding a white flag. Their bodies remain where they fell, he said, because ambulances cannot get to the area.

Sarit Michaeli of B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said she had had six reports of families stuck in areas now occupied by Israeli troops.

At times, the city took on a surreal quality. A woman came with a pan and dough to Al Nasir hospital, asking for the use of their electricity so she could bake. A corpse was wheeled in a donkey cart where an ambulance was afraid to go.

Humanitarian shipments were moving on Monday, and Egypt, under pressure to do more for Palestinian victims, agreed to allow in 38 Arab doctors and a group of European lawmakers.

Palestinians interviewed in Gaza on Monday cited another reason for their flight: Israeli soldiers, they allege, are firing rounds of a noxious substance that burns skin and makes it hard to breathe.

A resident in the southwest part of Gaza on Monday showed a reporter a piece of metal casing with the identifying number, M825A1, which Marc Garlasco, a military analyst with Human Rights Watch, identified as white phosphorous. It is typically used for signaling, producing smoke screens and destroying enemy equipment.

In recent years, military experts and human rights advocates have argued over whether its use to harm people violates international conventions.

Dallal would not say whether Israel was using white phosphorous but said: "The munitions we use are consistent with international law."

Still, white phosphorous causes injury, and a growing number of Gazans report being hurt by it in Beit Lahiya, Khan Yunis, and in eastern and southwestern Gaza City. When exposed to air, it ignites, the group says, and if packed into an artillery shell, it can rain down flaming chemicals that cling to anything they touch.

Luay Suboh, 10, from Beit Lahiya, lost his eyesight and skin on his face Saturday when, his mother Siham said, a casing clung to him as he darted home from a shelter where his family is staying.

The substance smelled like burned trash, said Jaawanah, the mother who fled her home in Zeitoun, who had experienced it too.

She had no affection for Hamas, but her sufferings are changing that.

"Do you think I'm against them firing rockets now?" she asked, referring to Hamas. "No. I was against it before. Not anymore."

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Jerusalem; Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Jerusalem; and Bill Broad contributed reporting from New York.

Who Killed The Electric Car!

2009-01-11T20:50:00.000-06:00

Defeat The Oil Companies!

Fuel, The Movie

2009-01-11T20:45:00.000-06:00

We can change the world.

Local Control Includes Self Defense.

2009-01-10T12:37:00.012-06:00

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Doug Trott wrote:

> Umm, Lee, this is the federal >government we're talking about, >right? The fat is spread throughout. >As a former recipient of some of the >51%, I can report that I saw little >waste, and a lot of "making do."

Doug, First I am not a liberal. Liberal and conservative labels
have been made useless by Reagan and his followers. A better
comparison is liberty and authoritarian. The pro-corporate folks who have taken control of the country have recruited people against their own best interests appealing to their authoritarian weaknesses. They simply lie about being against bigger government. The government has only grown since Reagan. Also, much of the waste happens before it gets to the folks in the field. For example, many of the purchases have not been requested by the Pentagon, but insisted upon by Senators where the projects are manufactured.

Also, if you were in the military, then you observe big government at work in the purest form of socialism in our society. The authoritarian mindset overlooks this fact.

They have taken our country in the same direction Hoover did. The problems they have left us with will require large government answers because of the nature of international trade, international security mess they have caused, global envirionmental issue and the security problems created by our dependence on petrochemicals.. If the country is repaired, we reduce military spending, and wrestled control of government away from the transnational corporations, then we can start thinking about moving to State and local control.

Unnecessary war is waste. Going back to the first Bush, where our ambassador told Saddam it was okay to invade Iraq, we have been wasting a lot of our national resources.

And, of course, the debt that started with Ronald Ray-gun that was primarily for mililtary spending. A big waste. Who are we making the 4.8 billion F-22 Raptor program to fight against? How about the new aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush at 6.2 billion? There is a lot we can cut in that 51%

>
> We'd do better in most cases to push the spending authority to state or
> local government.

Authoritarians never include their pet spending in pushing things to the local
local. I want to put defense in the hands of the State and local government. It is intellectual dishonesty to promote local spending and then conveniently forget about the primary federal expenditure.

> But that's just me, the Wendell Berry fan ;-) I think he
> observed that conservatives believe in big business and small government,
> and liberals believe in small business and big government. He takes the
> position that small is better in both cases...and as close to communities as
> possible.

You need to read more Berry. He is as against the industrial
military complex as I am. He also believes that corporations are
not people and the only way we can protect ourselves from global corporations is to cooperate. A local community cannot do this in isolation.

Doug, please read what Berry says about war in his response to 9/11: "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear"

A quote: "The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a 'new economy', but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

--
Lee Love in Minneapolis
http://mingeisota.blogspot.com/

"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with
forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am
free." ~ Wendell Berry

NY TImes A 50-Year Farm Bill By WES JACKSON and WENDELL BERRY

2009-01-09T11:05:00.000-06:00

We've been reading these two guys in the Midwest for years. I am happy that they are getting Op-Eds in the New York Times. -- Lee

January 5, 2009

Op-Ed Contributors

A 50-Year Farm Bill

By WES JACKSON and WENDELL BERRY

THE extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall — by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

This is a political issue, certainly, but it far transcends the farm politics we are used to. It is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs.

Wes Jackson is a plant geneticist and president of The Land Institute in Salina, Kan. Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer in Port Royal, Ky.

Top Reasons to Oppose the WTO

2009-01-05T08:11:00.001-06:00

The WTO is undemocratic and gives veto power to the corporations over our constitution. Corporations are not people. Individuals need to organize to defend our human rights and the environment. --Lee

Top Reasons to Oppose the WTO: "Top Reasons to Oppose the WTO

1. The WTO Is Fundamentally Undemocratic

The policies of the WTO impact all aspects of society and the planet, but it is not a democratic, transparent institution. The WTO rules are written by and for corporations with inside access to the negotiations. For example, the US Trade Representative gets heavy input for negotiations from 17 'Industry Sector Advisory Committees.' Citizen input by consumer, environmental, human rights and labor organizations is consistently ignored. Even simple requests for information are denied, and the proceedings are held in secret. Who elected this secret global government?

2. The WTO Will Not Make Us Safer

The WTO would like you to believe that creating a world of 'free trade' will promote global understanding and peace. On the contrary, the domination of international trade by rich countries for the benefit of their individual interests fuels anger and resentment that make us less safe. To build real global security, we need international agreements that respect people's rights to democracy and trade systems that promote global justice.

3. The WTO Tramples Labor and Human Rights

WTO rules put the 'rights' of corporations to profit over human and labor rights. The WTO encourages a 'race to the bottom' in wages by pitting workers against each other rather than promoting internationally recognized labor standards. The WTO has ruled that it is illegal for a government to ban a product based on the way it is produced, such as with child labor. It has also ruled that governments cannot take into account 'non commercial values' such as human rights, or the behavior of companies that do business with vicious dictatorships such as Burma when making purchasing decisions.

4. The WTO Would Privatize Essential Services

The WTO is seeking to privatize essential public services such as education, health care, energy and water. Privatization means the selling off of public assets - such as radio airwaves or schools - to private (usually foreign) corporations, to run for profit rather than the public good. The WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services, or GATS, includes a list of about 160 threatened services including elder and child care, sewage, garbage, park maintenance, telecommunications, construction, banking, insurance, transportation, shipping, postal services, and tourism. In some countries, privatization is already occurring. Those least able to pay for vital services - working class communities and communities of color - are the ones who suffer the most.

5. The WTO Is Destroying the Environment

The WTO is being used by corporations to dismantle hard-won local and national environmental protections, which are attacked as 'barriers to trade.' The very first WTO panel ruled that a provision of the US Clean Air Act, requiring both domestic and foreign producers alike to produce cleaner gasoline, was illegal. The WTO declared illegal a provision of the Endangered Species Act that requires shrimp sold in the US to be caught with an inexpensive device allowing endangered sea turtles to escape. The WTO is attempting to deregulate industries including logging, fishing, water utilities, and energy distribution, which will lead to further exploitation of these natural resources.

6. The WTO is Killing People

The WTO's fierce defense of 'Trade Related Intellectual Property' rights (TRIPs)—patents, copyrights and trademarks—comes at the expense of health and human lives. The WTO has protected for pharmaceutical companies' 'right to profit' against governments seeking to protect their people's health by providing lifesaving medicines in countries in areas like sub-saharan Africa, where thousands die every day from HIV/AIDS. Developing countries won an important victory in 2001 when they affirmed the right to produce generic drugs (or import them if they lacked production capacity), so that they could provide essential lifesaving medicines to their populations less expensively. Unfortunately, in September 2003, many new conditions were agreed to that will make it more difficult for countries to produce those drugs. Once again, the WTO demonstrates that it favors corporate profit over saving human lives.

7. The WTO is Increasing Inequality

Free trade is not working for the majority of the world. During the most recent period of rapid growth in global trade and investment (1960 to 1998) inequality worsened both internationally and within countries. The UN Development Program reports that the richest 20 percent of the world's population consume 86 percent of the world's resources while the poorest 80 percent consume just 14 percent. WTO rules have hastened these trends by opening up countries to foreign investment and thereby making it easier for production to go where the labor is cheapest and most easily exploited and environmental costs are low.

8. The WTO is Increasing Hunger

Farmers produce enough food in the world to feed everyone -- yet because of corporate control of food distribution, as many as 800 million people worldwide suffer from chronic malnutrition. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, food is a human right. In developing countries, as many as four out of every five people make their living from the land. But the leading principle in the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture is that market forces should control agricultural policies-rather than a national commitment to guarantee food security and maintain decent family farmer incomes. WTO policies have allowed dumping of heavily subsidized industrially produced food into poor countries, undermining local production and increasing hunger.

9. The WTO Hurts Poor, Small Countries in Favor of Rich Powerful Nations

The WTO supposedly operates on a consensus basis, with equal decision-making power for all. In reality, many important decisions get made in a process whereby poor countries' negotiators are not even invited to closed door meetings -- and then 'agreements' are announced that poor countries didn't even know were being discussed. Many countries do not even have enough trade personnel to participate in all the negotiations or to even have a permanent representative at the WTO. This severely disadvantages poor countries from representing their interests. Likewise, many countries are too poor to defend themselves from WTO challenges from the rich countries, and change their laws rather than pay for their own defense.

10. The WTO Undermines Local Level Decision-Making and National Sovereignty

The WTO's 'most favored nation' provision requires all WTO member countries to treat each other equally and to treat all corporations from these countries equally regardless of their track record. Local policies aimed at rewarding companies who hire local residents, use domestic materials, or adopt environmentally sound practices are essentially illegal under the WTO. Developing countries are prohibited from creating local laws that developed countries once pursued, such as protecting new, domestic industries until they can be internationally competitive. California Governor Gray Davis vetoed a 'Buy California' bill that would have granted a small preference to local businesses because it was WTO-illegal. Conforming with the WTO required entire sections of US laws to be rewritten. Many countries are even changing their laws and constitutions in anticipation of potential future WTO rulings and negotiations.

11. There are Alternatives to the WTO

Citizen organizations have developed alternatives to the corporate-dominated system of international economic governance. Together we can build the political space that nurtures a democratic global economy that promotes jobs, ensures that every person is guaranteed their human rights to food, water, education, and health care, promotes freedom and security, and preserves our shared environment for future generations.

12. The Tide is Turning Against Free Trade and the WTO!

International opposition to the WTO is growing. Massive protests in Seattle of 1999 brought over 50,000 people together to oppose the WTO—and succeeded in shutting the meeting down. When the WTO met in 2001, the Trade negotiators were unable meet their goals of expanding the WTO's reach. In Cancún, Mexico and Hong Kong, China, the WTO met thousands of activists in protest, scoring a major victory for democracy. Developing countries refused to give in to the rich countries' agenda of WTO expansion - and caused the talks to collapse!

GET INVOLVED!!

# EDUCATE your community and connect with local corporate issues through bringing speakers, videos, and books like GX's Globalize This! The Battle Against the World Trade Organization and Corporate Rule, available on our webstore.

# Join Global Exchange's Global Justice listserve."

Why France can't see past the burqa | csmonitor.com

2009-01-04T18:14:00.002-06:00

One of the things we were struck by during I 9 years living in Japan, is that Japan does not have the West's bias against Islamic and Arab people. Watching the cable news coverage of the invasion of Gaza the bias is incredibly apparent. From what Obama has said about the Middle East, I have little hope that this bias with change with him, but like Roosevelt, I hope his views become more rational while in office and we become an honest broker in the Middle East. We need to focus on principles of the right of self determination, security and human rights for all people and not just countries that are our close friends. Nothing will change in the Middle East unless the USA has the will to do it and forces change. -- Lee

Why France can't see past the burqa | csmonitor.com: "Why France can't see past the burqa
It denied citizenship to a Muslim woman for her conservative dress. Is that fair?
By Ronald P. Sokol

from the July 21, 2008 edition

AixenProvence, France - Moroccan-born Faiza Mabchour speaks French fluently, has three children born in France, and a French husband. Yet France's top administrative court last month denied her bid for citizenship.

The reason? Ms. Mabchour wears a burqa, a long veil that some Muslim women use to cover themselves from head to toe. In an interview with officials, she said she wore the burqa not for any special religious belief but because her husband asked her to. A government report stated that 'she lives in total submission to the men of her family, and the notion of questioning this submission does not even occur to her.'

The court said such a radical religious practice is incompatible with fundamental French values such as the equality of the sexes; thus, she was judged unable to assimilate – a must for citizenship.

The decision raises troubling issues for an ethnically diverse and religiously free society. The court was not denying her French nationality on the basis of her beliefs. Both France's 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights, guarantee absolute freedom of belief. The court must have denied nationality on the basis of her acts, but her only overt act was the wearing of the burqa.

Yet no French law regulates what clothes people can wear in their homes or general public. (France bans head scarves and other conspicuous religious symbols in public schools.) So Mabchour's burqa is lawful. That France should deny her citizenship on the sole basis of her behavior within the sphere of her own family is inconsistent with normal French tolerance of the private lives of its citizens.

France has by and large adopted the principle espoused in John Stuart Mill's famous 1859 essay On Liberty: 'The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.... His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.'

In denying Mabchour citizenship when she met all of the requirements save the inherently nebulous one of assimilation, the court came too close for comfort to a demand for religious orthodoxy. It is a paradoxical demand in a nation that insists on the exclusion of religion from the public sphere.

Her case raises two fundamental questions: What is gender equality, and what is citizenship? Is gender equality something more than a guarantee that male and female shall get equal pay for the same work and equal access to opportunities in all spheres to the extent possible? Did the French Supreme Court conclude that the principle of gender equality was violated since she wore the burqa because her husband asked her to? If she had explained that she wore it because that was her own independent choice would the court have given her French citizenship?

Is citizenship like membership in a club where all members must wear coats and ties or like a gang where members must sport a tattoo? Nationality, of course, is a method for defining outsiders. Most states define insiders by birth or parentage. As a leading textbook on immigration and citizenship observes, 'Birth is an unambiguous event about which states maintain relatively clear administrative records.'

This distinction leads to a supreme irony. As one Internet commentator noted, 'you have to be French to wear a burqa.' For if Mabchour had been born in Paris, she could wear whatever she pleased, including a burqa, but because she was born in Morocco her burqa rose up as an insurmountable obstacle to her acquiring French nationality.

One cannot help but wonder if Faiza Mabchour had been named Haruko Tanaka and appeared before the commissaire in a silk kimono walking five paces behind her French husband, whether the French court would have reached the same result.

Ronald P. Sokol is a practicing lawyer in Aix-en-Provence, France. He formerly taught at the University of Virginia Law School."

Lee Love Ikiru Pottery - War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things

2009-01-03T22:16:00.000-06:00

Lee Love Ikiru Pottery - War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things

Smudge: Coal, I Smells Good Too!

2008-12-23T12:10:00.000-06:00

data (JPEG Image, 488x360 pixels)

2008-12-14T20:29:00.001-06:00

data (JPEG Image, 488x360 pixels)

Brave Iraqi Reporter Speaks For Us All!

2008-12-14T16:44:00.000-06:00

Obama Quotes Michael Pollen!

2008-11-28T16:08:00.000-06:00

Agra-business jumped on Obama for quoting Michael Pollen about how we have to change our approach to food to improve our health! He talked about carbs and diabetes!

Bill Moyer's is interviewing Michael Pollen right now. Gotta stop monoculture agriculture. We made more greenhouse gasses from growing food than from any other source.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Unhappy Meal

NoVoterLeftBehind.Net: Minnesota 2008 Shaping up to Be Florida 2000, With Republicans Likely to Try to Stop the Franken-Coleman Recount - MarketWatch

2008-11-25T11:14:00.000-06:00

This is from the Wall Street Journal, which has no Democratic prejudice. They say Republicans will try to stop the recount and steal the Senatorial election like they did the Predidential in 2000 and 2004. Rove Republicans are criminals!

NoVoterLeftBehind.Net: Minnesota 2008 Shaping up to Be Florida 2000, With Republicans Likely to Try to Stop the Franken-Coleman Recount - MarketWatch: "NoVoterLeftBehind.Net: Minnesota 2008 Shaping up to Be Florida 2000, With Republicans Likely to Try to Stop the Franken-Coleman Recount

Last update: 10:14 a.m. EST Nov. 25, 2008
WASHINGTON, Nov 25, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Group Seeks Volunteers, Donations to Help Keep GOP From Repeating Gore-Bush Debacle By Forcing an End to Recount That is Likely to Go Against Republican Candidate.
With fewer than 200 votes now separating Minnesota Democrat Al Franken from embattled incumbent U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, it is now 'almost a certainty' that Republicans will use the same tactics they employed in Florida in the wake of the 2000 presidential election to shutdown a recount that is slipping away from them, according to NoVoterLeftBehind.net ( www.NoVoterLeftBehind.net), which is accepting donations and volunteers to fight back against the GOP efforts to steal the 2008 Minnesota Senate seat."

Raymond Avenue Show

2008-11-18T06:37:00.000-06:00

My "Morning Coffee" Tea Bowl

2008-11-07T06:15:00.000-06:00

Folks, Watch MSNBC Live Election Coverage Here.

2008-11-04T15:54:00.000-06:00

MSNBC LIVE http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/22887506#22887506

Let's See the Steroid Upped Governator Do This!

2008-11-01T19:34:00.000-05:00

Schwarzenegger is a no necked muscle head!

American Stories, American Solutions: 30 Minute Special

2008-10-30T11:22:00.000-05:00

We can create a paradigm shift. We have to demand it.

Obama's "Bubble Up" Economy.

2008-10-28T16:46:00.000-05:00

This is the actual quote from Obama's chat with the Dumber Plumber. (I am working class too, but don't believe it is an excuse for being uninformed and stupid." Palin and Samuel Wurzelbacher are dumb as doorstops.

What Obama was actually speaking to, was that in helping working class people, you spread the wealth around because instead of shipping the profit overseas, regular people spend it on plumbers, groceries, appliances, cars, going to college. Because our economy has depended so much on paper profits in the trickle down economy, there is nothing left to trickle down to the people doing the work.

McCain and the Republicans have become so used to lying that they can't tell the truth from what they make up. It surely is pitiful.

What Obama actually said:

"For folks like me who have worked hard, but frankly also been lucky, I don't mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress that I just met over there who's -- things are slow and she can barely make the rent.

My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. If you've got a plumbing business, you're going to be better off if you've got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody's so pinched that business is bad for everybody, and I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Return the Middle Class.

2008-10-26T05:22:00.000-05:00

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

Obama Japan For Obama!

2008-10-25T08:43:00.000-05:00

John McCain And The Keating Five.

2008-10-06T13:49:00.000-05:00

SNL's Take On VP Debates

2008-10-05T06:12:00.000-05:00

Can you say...

2008-10-02T20:40:00.000-05:00

News: New findings indicate HIV/AIDS pandemic began around 1900, earlier than previously thought. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News - Biotechnology from Bench to Business

2008-10-02T12:09:00.000-05:00

News: New findings indicate HIV/AIDS pandemic began around 1900, earlier than previously thought. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News - Biotechnology from Bench to Business: "New findings indicate HIV/AIDS pandemic began around 1900, earlier than previously thought

EUREKALERT
Contact: Laura Sivitz
sivitzl@niaid.nih.gov
301-402-1663
NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases"

The omnivore's dilemma : a natural history of four meals / Michael Pollan

2008-09-29T07:01:00.000-05:00

The omnivore's dilemma : a natural history of four meals / Michael Pollan

I heard this author interviewed on the radio. Very interesting!

What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.

In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.

The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.

Read the introduction and first chapter of
The Omnivore's Dilemma (PDF)

AMERICAN PRAYER

2008-09-28T18:32:00.000-05:00

Who Will Cut Your Taxes?

2008-09-21T05:25:00.000-05:00

Country Club First
The numbers show John McCain places his Country Club buddies ahead of ordinary Americans.

Source: Obama and McCain Tax Proposals a Washington Post article on a Tax Policy Center analysis.

WWJD?

2008-09-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

Matthew 25:35-40 (New International Version)

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,

I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

BARACK ON!

2008-06-02T10:32:00.002-05:00

The "Right" is Wrong: Jesus was a Liberal

2008-05-23T01:43:00.002-05:00

Matthew 25:31-46

31 'When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with
him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32All the nations
will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from
another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33and he
will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 34Then
the king will say to those at his right hand, "Come, you that are
blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world; 35for I was hungry and you gave me food, I
was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and
you welcomed me, 36I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick
and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me." 37Then
the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when was it that we saw you
hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?
38And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or
naked and gave you clothing? 39And when was it that we saw you sick or
in prison and visited you?" 40And the king will answer them, "Truly I
tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are
members of my family,* you did it to me." 41Then he will say to those
at his left hand, "You that are accursed, depart from me into the
eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42for I was hungry
and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to
drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you
did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit
me." 44Then they also will answer, "Lord, when was it that we saw you
hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did
not take care of you?" 45Then he will answer them, "Truly I tell you,
just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do
it to me." 46And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the
righteous into eternal life.'

Dwight Eisenhower Criticizes Texas Millionaires That Would Abolish Social Security? - BreakTheChain.org

2008-05-04T14:04:00.000-05:00

Republicans today would call Eisenhower's words liberal. But it is where the center was 50 years ago.

"'Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.'

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 11/8/54"

Hillary Is Only Destroying Her Future Political Career

2008-04-23T19:30:00.003-05:00

She could have been the next Supreme Court Justice or the Leader of the Senate.

"Webb says U.S. presence in Iraq draining nation

2008-04-07T00:55:00.000-05:00

"Webb says U.S. presence in Iraq draining nation
He says military is tied up, 'economy has gone down the tubes'

Monday, Apr 07, 2008 - 12:08 AM Updated: 01:11 AM

By TYLER WHITLEY
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

The war in Iraq ended five years ago, U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., said yesterday.

'From that point forward, we have been in a very tedious and contentious occupation, which is what people like myself were warning about before we went in,' the Vietnam War veteran and former secretary of the Navy said.

Webb, who has become one of the foremost critics of the Iraq war since taking office in 2006, appeared on the ABC news show 'This Week,' hosted by George Stephanopoulos.

Unlike in July 2007, when Webb and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., seated side by side, engaged in a heated confrontation on the Sunday talk show 'Meet the Press,' Webb and Graham sparred gently yesterday.

This time, they were separated by distance. Webb was in the Washington studio; Graham was elsewhere.

The two were asked to talk about America's presence in Iraq, on the eve of an appearance before Congress of Iraq commander Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who conceived of the troop-surge strategy that Republicans say is working and Democrats say is not.

Webb continued his criticism."

"This occupation has drained the country strategically in two different ways," Webb said.

"The first is that we have tied up the best maneuver forces in the world, the Army and the Marine Corps, on the streets, in the cities of one nation while the people were supposed to be fighting al-Qaida and other forces of terrorism, and, secondly, our grand strategic interests have fallen aside. Our economy has gone down the tubes, the price of oil has quadrupled and our main strategic adversary, China, has benefited."

Graham, acknowledging that the troops in Iraq are stressed, said, "The biggest stress of all is to lose a battle against terrorism that we can't afford to lose."

Webb said the United States needs to emphasize more regional diplomacy; Graham said the U.S. has to deal with Iran and Syria, which are arming some of the Iraqi insurgents.

Asked about recent remarks by Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, that the U.S. troops might have to stay in Iraq for 100 years in a noncombat status, Webb said: "We do not belong as an occupying power in that part of the world. . . . If the Republican side wants to have long-term bases, then they should be saying so."

Webb is among the uncommitted superdelegates to the national convention whom Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois are wooing in their close contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Obama, who is ahead, says superdelegates should follow the votes of the people; Clinton says they should decide on the basis of which candidate they think could best win the presidency.

"I think if they didn't want the superdelegates to have independent judgment, they wouldn't have created them," Webb said. " . . . I have the luxury of having two candidates who are really exciting the country and who are bringing more people into the process."

He added: "If I thought one or the other would be markedly better as president, I would endorse them, but I am really happy at this point to support them both."
Contact Tyler Whitley at (804) 649-6780 or twhitley@timesdispatch.com.

Barrack Obama / Jim Webb

2008-03-21T18:00:00.000-05:00

'We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.'

2008-03-20T10:04:00.001-05:00

Barack Obama's Speech On Race

Transcript: Sen. Barack Obama on March 18, 2008 in Philadelphia.

'We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.'

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters….And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today - a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Anam Ċara – A Book of Celtic Wisdom

2008-03-08T16:16:00.000-06:00

In our time, there is much obsession with spiritual programs. Such spiritual programs tend to be very linear. The spiritual life is imagined as a journey with a sequence of stages. Each stage has its own methodology, negativity, and possibilities. Such a program often becomes an end in itself. It weights our natural presence against us. Such a program can divide and separate us from what is most intimately ours. The past is forsaken as unredeemable, the present is used as the fulcrum to a future that bodes holiness, ntegration, or perfection. When time is reduced to linear progress, it is emptied of presence. Meister Eckhart radically revises the whole notion of spiritual programs. He says that there is no such thing as a spiritual journey. If a little shocking, this is refreshing. If there were a spiritual journey, it would be only a quarter inch long, though many miles deep. It would swerve into rhythm with your deeper nature and presence. The wisdom here is so consoling. You do not have to go away outside yourself to come into real conversation with your soul and with the mysteries of the spiritual world. The eternal is at home--within you.

The eternal is not elsewhere; it is not distant. There is nothing as near as the eternal. This is captured in a lovely Celtic phrase: "Tá tír na n-óg ar chul an tí--tír álainn trina chéile" -- that is, "The land of eternal youth is behind the house, a beautiful land fluent within itself." The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused. The beautiful Gaelic phrase fighte fuaighte, "woven into and through each other," captures this.

Behind the facade of our normal lives eternal destiny is shaping our days and our ways. The awakening of the human spirit is a homecoming. Yet ironically our sense of familiarity often militates against our homecoming. When we are familiar with something, we lose the energy, edge, and excitement of it. Hegel said, "Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt" -- that is, "Generally, the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not known." This is a powerful sentence. Behind the facade of the familiar, strange things await us. This is true of our homes, the place where we live, and, indeed, of those with whom we live. Friendships and relationships suffer immense numbing through the mechanism of familiarization. We reduce the wildness and mystery of person and landscape to the external, familiar image. Yet the familiar is merely a facade. Familiarity enables us to tame, control, and ultimately forget the mystery. We make our peace with the surface as image and we stay away from the Otherness and fecund turbulence of the unknown that it masks. Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation.

In a book of conversations with P. A. Mendoza, a Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, when asked about his thirty-year relationship with his wife, Mercedes, said, "I know her so well now that I have not the slightest idea who she really is." For Márquez, familiarity is an invitation to adventure and mystery. Conversely, the people close to us have sometimes become so familiar that they have become lost in a distance that no longer invites or surprises. Familiarity can be quiet death, an arrangement that permits the routine to continue without offering any new challenge or nourishment.

This happens also with our experience of place. I remember my first evening in Tübingen, Germany. I was to spend more than four years there studying Hegel, but that first evening Tübingen was utterly strange and unknown to me. I remember thinking, Look very carefully at Tübingen this evening because you will never again see it in the same way. And this was true. After a week there, I knew the way to the lecture halls and seminar rooms, the canteen and the library. After I had mapped out my routes through this strange territory, it became familiar, and soon I did not see it for itself anymore.

People have difficulty awakening to their inner world especially when their lives have become overly familiar to them. They find it hard to discover something new, interesting, or adventurous in their numbed lives. Yet everything we need for our journey has already been given to us. Consequently, there is great strangeness in the shadowed light of our soul world. We should become more conversant with our reserved soul-light. The first step in awakening to your inner life and to the depth and promise of your solitude would be to consider yourself for a little while as a stranger to your own deepest depths. To decide to view yourself as a complete stranger, someone who has just stepped ashore in your life, is a liberating exercise. This meditation helps to break the numbing stranglehold of complacency and familiarity. Gradually, you begin to sense the mystery and magic of yourself. You realize that you are not the helpless owner of a deadened life but rather a temporary guest gifted with blessings and possibilities you could neither invent nor earn.

--John O’Donohue in Anam Ċara – A Book of Celtic Wisdom

A Vote For Hillary Is A Republican Vote In The Fall!

2008-03-08T16:00:00.000-06:00

Obama leads Clinton in Wyoming - Los Angeles Times:

Your Vote In a November general election between Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton, I would vote for:

50.3% Hillary Clinton (WITHIN MARGIN OF ERROR!) Fear looses!
49.7% John McCain
10574 total responses

In a November general election between Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama, I would vote for:

32.0% John McCain
68.0% Barack Obama Obama Kicks McCain's butt easily!
11480 total responses

Correction: Obama Won In Texas Delegate Count

2008-03-07T21:09:00.002-06:00

"The Morning News
Local News for Northwest Arkansas

Correction: Obama Won In Texas Delegate Count
By John Brummett
THE MORNING NEWS

You may have received incorrect information about what happened in the Democratic presidential race the other night. There is the widespread impression that Hillary Clinton won Texas.

It looks like Barack Obama may well have.

I'll explain in a minute, but first, the larger picture: After all is said and done, it appears that Hillary will have gained maybe a half-dozen or so delegates nationally Tuesday night.

It appears that she remains behind Obama somewhere between 140 and 150 in earned delegates. And now she doesn't have so many big friendly states in which to make up that ground.

Her only hope is to make such a splash with a big win in Pennsylvania, and big wins in do-overs in Florida and Michigan, that the super delegates will go for her. They would catapult her past Obama's lead in delegates won via the voters - meaning, you know, the democratic way.

In other words, the white bosses would have kept down the black people again. It's not at all clear that the Democratic Party wants to do that - disenfranchise black people, I mean.

It is true that Hillary won three of the four primaries Tuesday, including the one in Texas. It is true that she has"

NPR: Will Split Decision Shift Texas to Obama?

2008-03-07T21:05:00.000-06:00

NPR: Will Split Decision Shift Texas to Obama?:

Watching WashingtonBy Ron Elving

Will Split Decision Shift Texas to Obama?

"Hillary Clinton has called her primary victories this week 'stunning,' but their contribution to her delegate total continues to dwindle.

Senator Clinton won the Ohio primary with a healthy margin and squeaked past 50 percent in the Texas primary. She went on TV as the shiny new star of the 2008 campaign, the belle of the ball once again. All the glitter seemed legit at the time. She had cleared a high bar set by no less an authority than Bill Clinton himself, who said she had to win both of the big states on March 4 or it was lights out.

But even as the confetti fell in Columbus there were flaws with the Comeback Kid scenario. The delegate dividends from the states she won were surprisingly poor. She picked up just four delegates net in the Texas primary, one fewer than her net gain of five in tiny Rhode Island. Even her big win in Ohio gave her just 74 delegates to Obama's 65.

Subtract from this total the three delegates Barack Obama netted in tiny Vermont and Senator Clinton had gained just 15 delegates in the March 4 primaries. Given that she trailed by 152 pledged delegates as the day began, this shift did not seem nearly as impressive as the victory celebration and headlines implied.

And now it appears that even her net gain of 15 on the day may be cut nearly in ha"

Hillary Is a Monster

2008-03-07T09:08:00.003-06:00

Is Hillary going to run as McCain's V.P.? It is her only route to the White House. When Bush Swiftboated Kerry, he used surrogates. Hillary is knifing Obama in the back herself! She out Roves Rove!

According to Hillary, experience is of primary importance. If we ONLY judge by that criteria, then McCain wins hands down.

Hillary is the largest reciever of industrial/military funds in the Senate and donations from the medical cartel. If you want change, vote for Obama. over 90% of his funding is from people like you and me.

Flashback! HRC once thought taxes should be open (Spin Cycle)

2008-03-06T09:37:00.000-06:00

Flashback! HRC once thought taxes should be open (Spin Cycle): "Flashback! HRC once thought taxes should be open

taxes.jpeg

A trip down memory lane:

Eight years ago, when Hillary parachuted into NY to become our Senator, she and Howard Wolfson became completely obsessed with opponent Rick Lazio's tax returns, which he did not release until the end of August..

They talked about them at every opportunity. In early July, Hillary called it 'frankly disturbing.' A guy in an Uncle Sam outfit was dispatched to be a nuisance at various Lazio events in August. Howard himself showed up once to try to rattle Lazio by offering him a copy of some Chappaqua property tax receipt after Lazio said he'd release his state returns as soon as Hillary released hers (which didn't exist, because she had just moved up here).

This produced a lot of coverage. We've copied one of the stories after the jump, if you're interested. But obviously, what brings it to mind is the current discussions of when, if ever, Clinton and Wolfson will release her tax returns as she runs for president this year. Their attitude has been, basically, when they feel like it.

Pressed again today by the Obama campaign, Wolfson said: 'Their tax returns since they left the White House will be made available on or around April 15.'

Maybe a"

Obama/Webb! Jim Webb's Democratic response to President Bush's speech

2008-03-06T06:57:00.000-06:00

Transcript: Webb says Bush took U.S. to war 'recklessly'

POSTED: 2:42 a.m. EST, January 24, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Below is the text of the Democratic response to President Bush's speech, delivered by Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia:

Economy

International affairs

Iraq

Good evening.

I'm Senator Jim Webb, from Virginia, where this year we will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown an event that marked the first step in the long journey that has made us the greatest and most prosperous nation on earth.

It would not be possible in this short amount of time to actually rebut the president's message, nor would it be useful. Let me simply say that we in the Democratic Party hope that this administration is serious about improving education and health care for all Americans, and addressing such domestic priorities as restoring the vitality of New Orleans.

Further, this is the seventh time the president has mentioned energy independence in his State of the Union message, but for the first time this exchange is taking place in a Congress led by the Democratic Party. We are looking for affirmative solutions that will strengthen our nation by freeing us from our dependence on foreign oil, and spurring a wave of entrepreneurial growth in the form of alternate energy programs. We look forward to working with the president and his party to bring about these changes.

There are two areas where our respective parties have largely stood in contradiction, and I want to take a few minutes to address them tonight. The first relates to how we see the health of our economy, how we measure it, and how we ensure that its benefits are properly shared among all Americans. The second regards our foreign policy, how we might bring the war in Iraq to a proper conclusion that will also allow us to continue to fight the war against international terrorism, and to address other strategic concerns that our country faces around the world.

Economy

When one looks at the health of our economy, it's almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it's nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.

Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world. Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts. Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them.

In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table. Our workers know this, through painful experience. Our white-collar professionals are beginning to understand it, as their jobs start disappearing also. And they expect, rightly, that in this age of globalization, their government has a duty to insist that their concerns be dealt with fairly in the international marketplace.

In the early days of our republic, President Andrew Jackson established an important principle of American-style democracy that we should measure the health of our society not at its apex, but at its base. Not with the numbers that come out of Wall Street, but with the living conditions that exist on Main Street. We must recapture that spirit today.

And under the leadership of the new Democratic Congress, we are on our way to doing so. The House just passed a minimum wage increase, the first in 10 years, and the Senate will soon follow. We've introduced a broad legislative package designed to regain the trust of the American people. We've established a tone of cooperation and consensus that extends beyond party lines. We're working to get the right things done, for the right people and for the right reasons.

International affairs

With respect to foreign policy, this country has patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years. Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism, and that invading and occupying Iraq would leave us strategically vulnerable in the most violent and turbulent corner of the world.

I want to share with all of you a picture that I have carried with me for more than 50 years. This is my father, when he was a young Air Force captain, flying cargo planes during the Berlin Airlift. He sent us the picture from Germany, as we waited for him, back here at home. When I was a small boy, I used to take the picture to bed with me every night, because for more than three years my father was deployed, unable to live with us full-time, serving overseas or in bases where there was no family housing. I still keep it, to remind me of the sacrifices that my mother and others had to make, over and over again, as my father gladly served our country. I was proud to follow in his footsteps, serving as a Marine in Vietnam. My brother did as well, serving as a Marine helicopter pilot. My son has joined the tradition, now serving as an infantry Marine in Iraq.

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues, those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death, we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way.

We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

Iraq

The president took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable and predicted disarray that has followed.

The war's costs to our nation have been staggering. Financially. The damage to our reputation around the world. The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism. And especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped forward to serve.

The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift toward strong regionally based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq's cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.

On both of these vital issues, our economy and our national security, it falls upon those of us in elected office to take action.

Regarding the economic imbalance in our country, I am reminded of the situation President Theodore Roosevelt faced in the early days of the 20th century. America was then, as now, drifting apart along class lines. The so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the national wealth. The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt.

Roosevelt spoke strongly against these divisions. He told his fellow Republicans that they must set themselves as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other. And he did something about it.

As I look at Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. "When comes the end?" asked the general who had commanded our forces in Europe during World War II. And as soon as he became president, he brought the Korean War to an end.

These presidents took the right kind of action, for the benefit of the American people and for the health of our relations around the world. Tonight we are calling on this president to take similar action, in both areas. If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way.

Michelle Obama Proud

2008-02-21T07:29:00.002-06:00

Original from Madison (I cannot verify):

Altered Madison:

Milwaukee and Madison Compared (I cannot verify these tapes):

Behind Obama and Clinton

2008-02-06T04:13:00.001-06:00

Read the entire article, click here.

Stephen Zunes | February 4, 2008

Editor: John Feffer

Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors tend to be veterans of President Bill Clinton’s administration, most notably former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Her most influential advisor - and her likely choice for Secretary of State - is Richard Holbrook

These folks all supported the invasion of Iraq.

Read the entire article, click here.

Have Courage! Never Give Up!

2007-08-07T21:08:00.000-05:00

The Constitution is caught between Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales.

What should Congress do?

The Herd has power to protect the weak.

Watch the whole vid for a happy ending! And the solution!

Berkeley Daily Planet

2007-01-09T21:50:00.000-06:00

We won't be "safe" until there is Peace in the Middle East.

Commentary: Jimmy Carter: The Courage to Tell the Truth

By Matthew Taylor

Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid paints a disturbing picture: of a state, Israel, that has consistently violated international law in its pursuit of territorial expansion at the expense of an indigenous population. A life-long friend of the Israeli people and the mediator of Israel’s peace agreement with Egypt, Carter is like a wise elder statesman who performs an intervention and tells an alcoholic in no uncertain terms, “It’s time to end this addiction, for your own benefit as well as for your family and friends.” Only in this case, the addiction is not to alcohol, but to colonization.

Based on personal experience, I can verify that the overall narrative and factual account of the book is not only accurate, it is of vital importance for all Americans to understand given the ways in which this systematic and willful oppression and dispossession of an entire people reverberates into the international arena.

Treating Palestinians as human beings of equal worth to Israelis, much less telling the whole truth about Israel’s destructive policies, is nearly taboo in the United States. When presidential candidate Howard Dean had the temerity in 2003 to propose that the United States be “even-handed” in its dealings with the two nations, he was furiously rebuked by a broad cross-section of Democratic Party leaders, including then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. The influence of the pro-Israel lobby is undeniable, documented, and at odds with the best interests of Americans, Palestinians, and yes, even Israelis and Jews around the world. The United States sends billions in military aid to Israel every year, which is used to fund the occupation and confiscation of Palestinian land in the West Bank. Thus, American taxpayers pay for Israel to oppress Palestinians, which inflames hatred against Israelis and Americans, and stokes anti-Jewish sentiment worldwide. How on Earth could that be a good thing? But the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its cohorts, including the Christian Zionists, have succeeded in creating a climate of fear, self-censorship, and near-uncritical support for Israel. In this context, Carter’s book is truly remarkable, a profile in courage writ large.

My extensive travels throughout the Holy Land in the summer of 2005 confirm that President Carter is telling a painful truth. When I was in a small Palestinian town adjacent to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, I witnessed the Israeli military bulldozing a Palestinian man’s home. Why was it demolished? For one reason: to build a road that is only accessible to Israeli colonizers (euphemistically known as “settlers”). The man and his family were not suspected of any form of undesirable activity. The Israeli government simply chose to steal their land.

This incident encapsulates the crux of the problems described in Carter’s book: colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. On one hand, he tells us, Israel for the past 39 years has willfully and flagrantly violated the Fourth Geneva Convention (to which it is a signatory) that “forbids an occupying power from transferring any parts of its civilian population into territories seized by military force.” Over 400,000 Israeli colonizers now live in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank (seized in the 1967 war), taking an enormous bite out of the 22 percent of British mandatory Palestine that the Palestine Liberation Organization has claimed as its state since 1988.

On the other hand, many Israeli colonizers live, work, or drive on stolen land. Bulldozing homes is ethnic cleansing, a deliberate attempt to make life so miserable for Palestinians that they have no choice but to emigrate. Israel has instituted numerous obstacles to normal life, such as movement barriers internal to Palestine that prohibit most citizens from traveling from one Palestinian city to another. In fact, many Palestinian women have given “birth” to stillborn babies at these movement barriers because they are denied the ability to travel to a hospital. Israel’s plan to force Palestinians to flee their homeland is working—thousands emigrate every year as they lose their land, their livelihoods, and their communities.

Finally, all of this constitutes apartheid (literally, “apartness” in Afrikaans) because in the West Bank, Israel has constructed an entirely separate set of exclusive facilities, public works, and roads for its colonizers, such that they live inside armed garrisons, completely separated from Palestinians. Israeli colonizers are provided up to 17 times more water access than Palestinians, and are able to comfortably fill swimming pools whereas Palestinians scrounge for enough to drink and cook. Israel’s apartheid is based on only slightly different criteria than it was in South Africa—in this case, Jewish vs. non-Jewish as opposed to white vs. non-white—but otherwise, the injustice is almost the same. Actually, it’s worse if one considers the extent of the land theft, exacerbated by Israel’s recent construction of an illegal wall/barrier inside the West Bank that has taken over 80 percent of the farmland of villages such as Bil’in.

I have personally met and spoken to numerous Israeli colonizers, and for the most extreme among them, Palestinians are barely recognizable as human beings if at all. According to these colonizers, all Palestinians are inferior to Jews and “they are all terrorists” no matter how obvious it is that Palestinian violence is a desperate response of a small minority of Palestinians to the oppression under which they live. For these colonizers, Palestinians should have no rights of any kind. Many prominent leaders of the colonizers openly advocate ethic cleansing (“transfer”) and propose that every last Palestinian be shipped off to Jordan. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who President Bush named a “man of peace,” called the Oslo peace agreement of the 1990s “national suicide” and stated, “Everybody has to move, run, and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours_ Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”

Carter’s overarching point is that successive Israeli governments have consistently undermined and frustrated every serious attempt to resolve the conflict by allowing their policies to be controlled and guided by the ideology and practice of colonization. For example, during Clinton’s administration and the Oslo accords, there was a 90 percent growth rate in illegal Israeli colonies in the occupied territories.

Carter’s account is both a personal reflection on his involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict—before, during, and after his presidency—and a detailed analysis of the current state of affairs. His writing is generally dry and descriptive, with occasional wry humor, and is rarely inspirational, emotional, or moving in its use of language. What is important about Carter’s treatment is the way in which he tells us the truth, bit by bit, about just how bad things have gotten.

There is hope: Carter details a variety of possible peace frameworks, such as the Arab League peace plan, to which every Arab government is a signatory. The plan calls for fully normalized relations with Israel in exchange for a return to the 1967 borders and a mutually agreed, just solution for refugees. Another possible two-state solution to the conflict is the Geneva Initiative, an unofficial agreement signed by numerous high-profile Palestinian and Israeli negotiators but never seriously considered by any Israeli government (Sharon rejected it out of hand, and current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has indicated no interest).

As an introduction to the conflict, Carter’s book is light on context and historical background. For instance, the founding of the state of Israel, which Palestinians describe as “Al Naqba” (The Catastrophe) because it led to roughly 700,000 refugees being prohibited from returning to their homes, is barely mentioned. (See historians Mark Tessler, Charles Smith, or Ilan Pappe.) Further, little attention is paid to grassroots peace movements or their significance. Carter also does not mention the less severe, though still systematic and deplorable discrimination against Palestinians inside pre-1967 Israel. What Carter successfully provides is a thorough and accessible political exploration of what is necessary to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict, and what’s standing in the way.

Carter’s conclusion—that the primary obstacle to peace is Israel’s unending colonial project—is a profoundly unsettling one. And his analysis is quite similar to that of many Israelis who have devoted their lives to peace and justice, such as Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, who recently published an even more pointed critique of Israel’s policies entitled “The Problem with Israel” (see www.icahd.org). Will Americans finally wake up to the truth and push the U.S. government to change its foreign policy to stop financing the occupation and compel Israel to implement one of the above-mentioned plans for peace, justice, and reconciliation? If such a thing happens, Carter will be rightly acknowledged as the best friend Israelis ever had, even as many attack and denigrate him now for exposing an inconvenient truth about Israel’s addiction to colonization.

Matthew Taylor is a fifth-year Peace and Conflict Studies student at UC Berkeley, editor of PeacePower magazine (www.calpeacepower.org), and Jewish.

Israel has plans for nuclear strike on Iran: paper | Top News | Reuters.com

2007-01-09T21:48:00.000-06:00

We need a Nuclear Free Middle East/Planet.

Israel has plans for nuclear strike on Iran: paper Reuters.com:

LONDON (Reuters) - Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper said.

Citing what it said were several Israeli military sources, the paper said two Israeli air force squadrons had been training to blow up an enrichment plant in Natanz using low-yield nuclear "bunker busters".

Two other sites, a heavy water plant at Arak and a uranium conversion plant at Isfahan, would be targeted with conventional bombs, the Sunday Times said.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously last month to slap sanctions on Iran to try to stop uranium enrichment that Western powers fear could lead to making bombs. Tehran insists its plans are peaceful and says it will continue enrichment.

Israel has refused to rule out pre-emptive military action against Iran along the lines of its 1981 air strike against an atomic reactor in Iraq, though many analysts believe Iran's nuclear facilities are too much for Israel to take on alone.

The newspaper said the Israeli plan envisaged conventional laser-guided bombs opening "tunnels" into the targets. Nuclear warheads would then be used fired into the plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce radioactive fallout.

Israeli pilots have flown to Gibraltar in recent weeks to train for the 2,000 mile round-trip to the Iranian targets, the Sunday Times said, and three possible routes to Iran have been mapped out including one over Turkey.

However it also quoted sources as saying a nuclear strike would only be used if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene. Disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, the paper added.

Washington has said military force remains an option while insisting that its priority is to reach a diplomatic solution.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". Israel, widely believed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, has said it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

The Declaration of Independence

2006-03-11T10:54:00.000-06:00

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offencesFor abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:
Column 1Georgia: Button Gwinnett Lyman Hall George Walton

Column 2North Carolina: William Hooper Joseph Hewes John PennSouth Carolina: Edward Rutledge Thomas Heyward, Jr. Thomas Lynch, Jr. Arthur Middleton

Column 3Massachusetts:John HancockMaryland:Samuel ChaseWilliam PacaThomas StoneCharles Carroll of CarrolltonVirginia:George WytheRichard Henry LeeThomas JeffersonBenjamin HarrisonThomas Nelson, Jr.Francis Lightfoot LeeCarter Braxton

Column 4Pennsylvania: Robert Morris Benjamin Rush Benjamin Franklin John Morton George Clymer James Smith George Taylor James Wilson George RossDelaware: Caesar Rodney George Read Thomas McKean

Column 5New York: William Floyd Philip Livingston Francis Lewis Lewis MorrisNew Jersey: Richard Stockton John Witherspoon Francis Hopkinson John Hart Abraham Clark

Column 6New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett William WhippleMassachusetts: Samuel Adams John Adams Robert Treat Paine Elbridge GerryRhode Island: Stephen Hopkins William ElleryConnecticut: Roger Sherman Samuel Huntington William Williams Oliver WolcottNew Hampshire: Matthew Thornton

The Bill Of Rights

2006-03-11T10:42:00.000-06:00

Note: The following text is a transcription of the first ten amendments to the Constitution in their original form. These amendments were ratified December 15, 1791, and form what is known as the "Bill of Rights."

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment VII

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Amendments 11-27

We Must Educate Ourselves

Texas...a failed conservative experiment - Baltimore Nonpartisan | Examiner.com

A Friend On the Liberal Gun Club Board Inspired me to Find this.

Rick Perry’s newbie mistake on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - The Fact Checker - The Washington Post

Andrew Breitbart Incites Violence Against Liberals, Says Military Will Back The Tea Party Up | Addicting Info

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear | Wendell Berry | Orion Magazine

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would “grow” on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be “unprecedented”.

IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homelands and our lives.

X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy (either as a money economy or as a life-support system) that is global in extent, technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by “national defense”

XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local needs had been met.

XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of Pearl Harbor - to which the present attack has been often and not usefully compared - we humans have suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars, none of which has brought peace or made us more peaceable.

XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.

XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air. We should protect every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have left, and begin restoration of those that have been damaged.

We Must Stop Eating The Seed Corn!

A Fierce Debate on the Budget

What is a Real Conservative?

Health And The First World. (repost)

Serious Fun: TrueMajorityACTION.org

Synopsis of H.R. 3200

AAHCA-BILLSUMMARY-071409.pdf (application/pdf Object)

kennedy-and-dodd-dear-colleague.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Comparision of Health Care Systems and Health

Fake Protests Funded By the GOP and Corporations.

The CorporateFacist Are Up To Their DIrty Tricks Still.

Ventura Wants Obama To Prosecute the Torturers.

Media Matters - The Limbaugh Wire for 04/14/2009

Is America Weighed Down By 'Dead Ideas'? : NPR

Is America Weighed Down By 'Dead Ideas'?

The Tyranny of Dead IdeasBy Matt MillerTimes BooksHardcover, 282 pagesList Price: $25

The Stimulus Plan: A Detailed List of Spending - ProPublica

Ashley Judd slams Sarah Palin for ‘promoting aerial killing of wolves’

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Darwin's twin track: 'Evolution and emancipation

Darwin's twin track: 'Evolution and emancipation'

The Clean Coal Myth

Unmasking the truth behind "clean coal"

Military-Industrial Complex Speech

Adam Smith The Theory of the Moral Sentiments 1759

Only Morons Listen To This Idiot.

A Play About Shells for Gaza Children - NYTimes.com

A Play About Shells for Gaza Children

Bye, Bye, Bush!

"'To lock people into a war zone is something that evokes the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto..."

Barack Berry

Ron Reagan: Chinese Officials Gag Obama

BE THE CHANGE

"Antarctica Heating Up, 'Ignored' Satellite Data Show

Tell Obama: Clean Coal Is A MYTH.

TRANSCRIPT: Obama's Inaugural Address

'Air and Simple Gifts' John Williams at Obama Inauguration

Theres no one as Irish as Barack OBama- Corrigan Brothers

"Air and Simple Gifts", composed by John Williams

"Air and Simple Gifts", composed by John Williams

"Simple Gifts" was written by Elder Joseph

We Are Back!

Gaza is dying

Peace Is Patriotic.

A 'torrent' of refugees raise concerns of a broader Gaza war - International Herald Tribune

A 'torrent' of refugees raise concerns of a broader Gaza war

Multimedia

Who Killed The Electric Car!

Fuel, The Movie

Local Control Includes Self Defense.

NY TImes A 50-Year Farm Bill By WES JACKSON and WENDELL BERRY

A 50-Year Farm Bill

Top Reasons to Oppose the WTO

Why France can't see past the burqa | csmonitor.com

Lee Love Ikiru Pottery - War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things

Smudge: Coal, I Smells Good Too!

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Brave Iraqi Reporter Speaks For Us All!

Obama Quotes Michael Pollen!

NoVoterLeftBehind.Net: Minnesota 2008 Shaping up to Be Florida 2000, With Republicans Likely to Try to Stop the Franken-Coleman Recount - MarketWatch

Raymond Avenue Show

My "Morning Coffee" Tea Bowl

Folks, Watch MSNBC Live Election Coverage Here.

Let's See the Steroid Upped Governator Do This!

American Stories, American Solutions: 30 Minute Special

Obama's "Bubble Up" Economy.

Return the Middle Class.

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas
By Matt Miller
Times Books
Hardcover, 282 pages
List Price: $25