Breaking News Events

[Andrew, Jr.]

Fort Hood Shooting (Texas)

7 dead
20 injured
1 in custody after shooting (unsure of multiple shooters)
Army Base that deals with the soldiers coming back from overseas duty

[Andrew, Jr.]

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 5 others from Guantanamo Bay are going to be tried in a criminal court in New York City. How do you feel about this?

[SuperFemme]

Tallest Man Unveils Largest Gingerbread Cookie

The world's tallest living man has unveiled the world's largest gingerbread man at an Ikea outlet in Norway's capital, Oslo.Guinness Book of World Recordsspokeswoman Justine Bourdariat says 8-foot-1-inch Sultan Koesen of Turkey displayed the 1,435-pound biscuit.Read the story: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33889619 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33889619/ns/world_news-weird_news/)

[SuperFemme]

Ring Returned to Vietnam POW 44 Years After Imprisonment

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

John Ingle, 82nd Training Wing Public Affairs

With the traditional "I do's" and exchange of wedding bands some 54 years ago on Oct. 1, 1955, James and Phyllis Hivner began their life's journey together which, like many young couples, began with not knowing what the future held.That journey was rocked 10 years later, almost to the day, when then-Capt. James Hivner and his co-pilot, 1st Lt. Thomas Barrett, were shot down Oct. 5, 1965, in their F-4C Phantom fighter-bomber over North Vietnam. About 10 minutes after ejecting from the wounded aircraft, the pair was captured by North Vietnamese militia and soon handed over to the country's regular army. By the end of the night, they were residents at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, a prisoner-of-war facility.But another voyage began that fateful day; one that gives hope for this thing called the "circle of life." It was an expedition that now-retired Col. James Hivner never expected. His original wedding ring was coming home.Just as the ring symbolizes the family the Hivners began in 1955, it also signifies the Air Force family the colonel joined in 1953. On Nov. 11, Veterans Day, people from Sheppard Air Force Base made the two-hour trip to Addison, Texas, make this a complete family event and witness the return of the ring to Colonel Hivner."This is an incredible opportunity for our young Airmen in training and our young student pilots to meet a fellow Airman warrior," said Brig. Gen. O.G. Mannon, 82nd Training Wing commander. "Colonel Hivner is a living example of executing the Code of Conduct, surviving a terrible situation and coming home. We are honored to be in his presence and be part of this very special ceremony."Back on Oct. 5, 1965, Colonel Hivner said he and Lieutenant Barrett were flying the third aircraft in a four-ship formation that was on a bombing run near the city of Kep in Southwest Cambodia. The mission was going smoothly until the aircrews made their way through a valley, setting up to offload their munitions.The first two aircraft in the formation seemed to fly through the area without resistance, the colonel said. But the lack of resistance didn't last long as flak started to appear around Colonel Hivner's aircraft."Wingman No. 4 called and said, 'Three, you're hit. You're on fire,'" the colonel recalled.He said he began to gradually climb at a smaller angle than usual to keep fuel from getting to the flames. Peering ahead at the lead aircraft, Colonel Hivner said he realized that they had missed the target, an ammunition depot. He said he adjusted his F-4C to get a correct heading on the target, and then dropped his munitions."Right as I pulled off the target, I felt another thump," Colonel Hivner said. "(Wingman 4) told us we were burning again."After the second hit, the colonel said warnings inside the aircraft started sounding and he was losing control of the Phantom. He instructed Lieutenant Barrett to get ready to eject. "By the time I said 'ready,' he was saying he was ready," he quipped.Ten minutes later, the two would be prisoners of the North Vietnamese."It turned out to be the first bad day of many bad days," Colonel Hivner said.

There was one lesson the colonel learned soon after punching out of the F-4C Phantom: never bail out of an airplane right after you drop bombs on a target.Immediately after assessing their situation, Colonel Hivner said he and Lieutenant Barrett began doing what the Air Force had taught them: escape and evade. After hearing the enemy yelling, the downed pilots began moving in the opposite direction. The colonel said they came upon a hill and thought they would successfully evade the enemy. That was until they crested the hill and saw more enemy troops headed toward them.Armed with only their wits and a .38-caliber revolver each, the colonel said they were hoping to escape, but now it turned into just staying alive."We were hoping we'd be captured, not killed," he said. "The gunfire stopped. There was a lot of yelling and screaming."The Airmen were taken to a nearby village and stripped of everything: maps, boots, weapons and dog tags. The enemy even took the colonel's symbol of love for his wife, his wedding ring."I didn't think about my ring until much later," Colonel Hivner said, adding that POWs have plenty of time to think when locked up in solitary. "I was hoping, like many of us, that when we're released, they would give us (back our) things."The colonel admitted he wasn't then, and isn't now, a "jewelry guy." The ring was important to him because of what it symbolized, he said, but he didn't need it to feel or proclaim that he's married. In fact, he said, he didn't wear the ring for the most part because of the hazards of it getting caught on something while flying.But, it was a little piece of home, a reminder of sorts, that was stripped from him."The ring is just another thing they take away from you," Colonel Hivner said. "It's part of your life they take away from you."The colonel said he kept his ring and dog tag on a metal loop, tucked inside a pocket on his flight suit. Also on the loop was a "rat fink," a little rat-looking toy his daughter had gotten out of a gumball machine before he deployed to Southeast Asia. The colonel said his daughter, 6 years old at the time, gave it to him, he recalled. He said he had to break the news to her when he returned eight years later that he did not return with the gift she had given him.Unless someone has lived in captivity, it's difficult to understand the emotions that go along with it, the colonel said. Still, today, Colonel Hivner dreams about his years as a POW, some good and some, obviously, bad."Yes, I was tortured. Yes, I was beaten. Yes, it was Hell," the colonel said. "But, I like to focus on the brighter things."The former POW said that that philosophy is one way he was able to survive his ordeal. He said he always had a penchant for looking at the brighter side, being a jokester and being able to laugh. He used that skill to combat falling into a mental world that was almost as dark and dank as the cells in which he stayed.He shared one story about how the POWs communicated since they were usually in a small cell by themselves and very rarely, in the early going, allowed to knowingly communicate. The colonel said they communicated by tapping on the cell wall, similar to using Morse code or an old-style telegraph.It occurred at Camp Skid Row, Colonel Hivner said. All camps had names. Some had multiple names. Skid Row was a long building with very small cells. There was a small hole in each door, large enough to see a 10-foot wall just outside. The colonel said the view tended to get to the POWs after a while.One evening, he said he tapped out "G.N., G.B." -- good night, God bless -- to a fellow POW next to him. Although there was no verbal communication, the colonel said he could tell something wasn't right."I got to the point to where I could sense how someone was feeling by how they tapped," Colonel Hivner said. "So I asked, 'are you OK?' He replied, 'I'm feeling mighty low,' or something to that effect."The colonel said he tried to figure out a way to make this fellow servicemember feel better from his tiny cell, probably not measuring any bigger than 12-by-12 feet. After thinking about it for a while, the colonel tapped the first thing that came to mind: "Going out for a pizza. What do you want?""He replied, 'anything but anchovies,'" he recalled. "It was very special to me because I didn't know this guy."Several years later, Colonel Hivner said he met the unknown POW. He said his last name was Waggoner and that his new friend told him how that simple gesture saved his life at that point."That was great," the colonel said. "That really helped.Seven-and-a-half years. 2,687 days. Eight Christmases. Eight birthdays. Eight wedding anniversaries. These were all things stolen from Colonel Hivner while he lived as a prisoner of war, primarily at the Hanoi Hilton, but at other camps in North Vietnam, including Skid Row.The Vietnam War did end for many American Airmen, Soldiers, Sailors and Marines. Many of them returned with their military units. Some returned on the infamous Freedom Bird, the aircraft that carried American POWs home. For years they thought of two things: survival and home.Colonel Hivner said he knows a lot of former POWs who made the trip back to Vietnam to see where they spent days, months and years wondering when, or if, they would ever go home. The colonel said he has never had the desire to revisit the place that stripped away missed memories of seeing his 6- and 8- year-old daughters grow into 14- and 16-year-old young women."I didn't leave anything there that I needed to go back for," he said.The colonel was glad to be home, glad to come back together as a family and glad to continue on the lifelong journey with his first love, Phyllis.Although the colonel came home, his wedding ring, dog tag and the rat fink from his daughter didn't make it. But, the Hivners purchased another wedding ring to replace the one lost in Vietnam. It now sits in a jewelry box, the colonel said. After all, he said, he's not a "jewelry man."It's rare that fate deals you a bad blow but then makes amends later in life. Colonel Hivner was shot down over a hostile area and was imprisoned for nearly eight years. He lost just about everything that he had and knew, including his wedding ring. The colonel got a new ring. He said it almost looks like his original one.A stranger from South Texas, though, was about to do something that was never expected. It was almost too impossible to expect.Rick Tolley, a retired U.S. Navy commander from San Antonio, came into possession of the colonel's original wedding ring and dog tag. The rat fink didn't make the voyage back. He started research on the whereabouts of Colonel Hivner and discovered he was still alive, living north of Dallas-Fort Worth.Because it was so farfetched, when he heard, Colonel Hivner said he wasn't sure if he should believe the story or not."I was skeptical at first," the colonel said once he was contacted by Commander Tolley. Commander Tolley provided some insight to the ring's mysterious journey from Southeast Asia to South Texas and ultimately to the colonel. He said his former son-in-law was working in Vietnam when he was approached by a retired Vietnamese army soldier. "He told John that he was cleaning out his desk and found these items," Commander Tolley said of the ring and dog tag. Also on the metal loop was a small cross. "(The soldier told him) if he would take on this mission of finding (the former POW) and return them in peace and respect, he would let him have them."The former son-in-law agreed to return the items and contacted Commander Tolley Oct. 15 on Facebook. The commander said he accepted the challenge of finding Colonel Hivner, and, soon after, located him through the Internet.Commander Tolley agreed that he initially thought finding Colonel Hivner was going to be like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack ... if the needle even existed. But, that didn't stop him."There was that feeling," he said, "but because of what it was and because I know about the history of the war, I was bound and determined to find him or his family."Colonel Hivner said he had no doubt who the ring's owner was after seeing a picture of the inside of the ring. Engraved inside his ring is his wife's initials and the date they were married.The colonel said the missing ring didn't change their lives, and he didn't expect its re-emergence to change it now. That, however, doesn't mean he wasn't appreciative or surprised at the fact that his original wedding ring and dog tag made their journey home 44 years after the darkest chapter in his life began."The never ending line is a circle," the colonel explained, adding that his wedding ring symbolizes his never ending love for his wife. "It's very special to me. I'm anxious to actually see the ring ... to look inside there with my tired old eyes and see the inscription."Commander Tolley personally returned the ring and dog tag to Colonel Hivner during a meeting Nov. 11 at the Cavanaugh Flight Museum that was witnessed by family, friends and members of the Air Force family from Sheppard Air Force Base.

[MsDemeanor]

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 5 others from Guantanamo Bay are going to be tried in a criminal court in New York City. How do you feel about this?
I think that it's about damn time that Gitmo prisoners were given their day in court. I have serious doubts about any court in NYC being able to find twelve impartial jurors, though. Is there anyone in the city who wasn't somehow impacted by the event? Even people who lived elsewhere at the time are probably impacted.

[Andrew, Jr.]

MsDemeanor,

I agree with your post. I think it will be next to impossible to get a jury of 12 people in NYC that are impartial to the attacks. Plus spending money for their safety/security.

[Queerasfck]

Tallest Man Unveils Largest Gingerbread Cookie

The world's tallest living man has unveiled the world's largest gingerbread man at an Ikea outlet in Norway's capital, Oslo.Guinness Book of World Recordsspokeswoman Justine Bourdariat says 8-foot-1-inch Sultan Koesen of Turkey displayed the 1,435-pound biscuit.Read the story: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33889619 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33889619/ns/world_news-weird_news/)


Good reporting here!!! From one uni to another!

[MsDemeanor]

It's not exactly "breaking", since the story is from last week, but three cheers to Will Phillips, a ten year old who refuses to stand and say the pledge of allegiance at his school while the country discriminates against gay people.

linkyloo (http://www.arktimes.com/articles/articleviewer.aspx?ArticleID=2f5d7a3b-c72a-446b-8d20-3823aa79c021)

:clap:

[SuperFemme]

Good reporting here!!! From one uni to another!

one cannot go wrong mixing height and gingerbread.

wonder twin powers, activate!

[Greyson]

The California State Senator officially came out of the closet today during a radio interview with a conservative woman talk show host in Kern County.

Senator Ashburn is the person that was arrested after leaving a gay nightclub, Faces, in Sacramento last week.

Unfortunately or fortunately this is not the first time nor most likely the last time a queer identified person has worked against the human rights of LGBTQ people.

______________________________________________
Sacramento Bee

The latest on California politics and government

March 8, 2010
Sen. Roy Ashburn: 'I'm gay'
Republican Sen. Roy Ashburn, who has been on leave from the Senate since his DUI arrest last week, confirmed today that he is gay.

"I'm gay," Ashburn told KERN radio host Inga Barks in an interview this morning. "Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long."

Ashburn's announcement follows reports that Ashburn was leaving a gay club before he was arrested for driving under the influence last week.

The Bakersfield Republican, who has consistently voted against gay-rights measures, said his votes were a reflection of how the majority of voters in his conservative district would have wanted him to vote.

Ashburn, who is divorced, has been on personal leave in the Senate since last week's arrest. He is expected to return today.

[SuperFemme]

Major Christian group: Sea World death result of ignoring Bible

Most whale experts have said the tragic death of Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau was the result (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2010/02/25/DI2010022502321.html) of a killer whale kept too long in captivity that had killed before and should not have been allowed to continue performing shows in the first place.The American Family Association, an influential Christian group, has a somewhat different explanation. In a post (http://www.afa.net/Blogs/BlogPost.aspx?id=2147492239) to the group's Web site last week, one of the group's spokesman explained the incident as a failure of Americans to follow Biblical teaching.

"Chalk another death up to animal rights insanity and to the ongoing failure of the West to take counsel on practical matters from the Scripture," wrote Bryan Fischer, the group's official blogger.

Fischer quoted two passages from Exodus. The first, Exodus 21:28, states: “When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.”

By the reasoning of Fischer, America should be governed by Biblical law. If it were, then Tilikum, the killer whale responsible for Brancheau's death, should have been stoned to death after the first time he killed someone.

[Greyson]

Okay, not exactly hard news. I just heard on CNN that Anderson Cooper will be interviewing Chaz Bono tonight and talking about his transition. Not sure if it has played on the East Coast yet. Most likely if you miss it, can find it on the CNN website or YouTube.


Will be on tonight at 10 pm eastern time, 7pm PST.

[UofMfan]

My Sundays just got a little better. I know, not major news, but I do have a thing for Christiane.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/18/christiane-amanpour-to-ho_n_504697.html

[Apocalipstic]

My Sundays just got a little better. I know, not major news, but I do have a thing for Christiane.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/18/christiane-amanpour-to-ho_n_504697.html

I really like her too! :)

[Tommi]

Dear friends,

Nancy Pelosi has the ability to end workplace discrimination of LGBTQ people, but she is refusing to act. It's time to let her know that we won't wait any longer.

As you read this, GetEqual.org members are entering Pelosi's offices in DC and her district office in San Francisco. They won't leave until Speaker Pelosi commits to bring the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to the floor for a vote this month - or until they are arrested.

GetENDA Screen Capture (http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=RuCORDmocIqcC09slNeSPt8Np5lYXR7j) http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=RuCORDmocIqcC09slNeSPt8Np5lYXR7j

Check out this video from the group in San Francisco, and call Speaker Pelosi's office. http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=p%2Bw0VQJsUTHNnKA6MWnzGt8Np5lYXR7j

Speaker Pelosi needs to hear from our community today. Can you call Speaker Pelosi right now to demand that ENDA (HR 3017) move to the floor for a vote? (202) 225-4965

After you call, please click here to tell us about it, even if you get a busy signal or can't get through. http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=FM6J4ipExxJWc81rGgNSgYlTkrAN3eg3

A majority of Congress supports this bill to stop job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, but promises to bring it to a vote last fall were broken several times. ENDA has been jammed up in committee for six months, awaiting a signal from Speaker Pelosi that hasn't come. We have visited, called and written Congress by the thousands, and have been ignored. The usual lobbying tactics do not appear to be having the needed effect. Now the midterm elections are coming, and Speaker Pelosi has promised Congress no more "controversial" votes. The "controversy" is whether LGBT Americans have the right to a job. This "tyrrany of the majority" must stop. Nonviolent direct action is relevant and needed and it's happening now.

ENDA is important because studies show that LGBT workers endure high unemployment, underemployment and harassment. We have to lie and hide in order to get and keep a job. In 30 states across America, there is no law against firing someone based on his or her sexual orientation, and the same is true in 38 states for gender identity. Ask Police Officer Michael Carney of Springfield, Massachusetts, who testified before Congress about the harassment he had to endure in the station house before being fired. Ask Vandy Beth Glenn of Atlanta, Georgia, who told Congress about being fired from her job as a proofreader with the Georgia legislature because she is transgender. This has gone on long enough.

If you want more information on Speaker Pelosi's position, and the demand that she move ENDA forward, you can find it here. http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=OmsV4IPl%2F4YBnfnQrTl8vt8Np5lYXR7j

Will you join with us in demanding that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people be protected from job discrimination?

Call Speaker Pelosi's office at (202) 225-4965 to ask that ENDA (HR 3017) move forward to a vote. Be polite, but firm. Take action now, and please let us know how it goes. http://org2.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=RdHfzxMpP0qXMVPEJ92NW98Np5lYXR7j

As President Obama himself said, quoting Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a demand." We know Speaker Pelosi is sympathetic to our cause, but is she ready to act on our civil rights? It is time for a demand.

-Jillian Weiss and the GetEQUAL crew

GetEQUAL logo https://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6535/images/ge-icon-black.gif

[Greyson]

I am beginning to think "States Rights" is being used as a code word that translates into people currently in power, at the top of the food chain feeling very threatened. (I will not be explicit in saying what group is at the top of the heap.)

Since Obama became the President of the USA seems like many of my fellow Americans have become very concerned about "States Rights." However when it serves in the interest of their agenda, not a word about the Federal Government inserting its power in areas that are traditionally left to the discretion of State Government. Thinking about DOMA as a case in point.
______________________________________________



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/22/AR2010032201400.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics

States launch lawsuits against healthcare plan

Reuters
Monday, March 22, 2010; 1:21 PM



CHICAGO (Reuters) - Less than 24 hours after the House of Representatives gave final approval to a sweeping overhaul of healthcare, attorneys general from several states on Monday said they will sue to block the plan on constitutional grounds.

Republican attorneys general in 11 states warned that lawsuits will be filed to stop the federal government overstepping its constitutional powers and usurping states' sovereignty.

States are concerned the burden of providing healthcare will fall on them without enough federal support.

Ten of the attorneys general plan to band together in a collective lawsuit on behalf of Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington.

"To protect all Texans' constitutional rights, preserve the constitutional framework intended by our nation's founders, and defend our state from further infringement by the federal government, the State of Texas and other states will legally challenge the federal health care legislation," said Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, in a statement.

The Republican attorney generals say the reforms infringe on state powers under the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, who plans to file a lawsuit in federal court in Richmond, Virginia, said Congress lacks authority under its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce to force people to buy insurance. The bill also conflicts with a state law that says Virginians cannot be required to buy insurance, he added.

"If a person decides not to buy health insurance, that person by definition is not engaging in commerce," Cuccinelli said in recorded comments. "If you are not engaging in commerce, how can the federal government regulate you?"

In addition to the pending lawsuits, bills and resolutions have been introduced in at least 36 state legislatures seeking to limit or oppose various aspects of the reform plan through laws or state constitutional amendments, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

So far, only two states, Idaho and Virginia, have enacted laws, while an Arizona constitutional amendment is seeking voter approval on the November ballot. But the actual enactment of the bill by President Barack Obama could spur more movement on the measures by state lawmakers.

As is the case on the Congressional level, partisan politics is in play on the state level, where no anti-health care reform legislation has emerged in Democrat-dominated states like Illinois and New York, according to the NCSL.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, a Republican candidate running for governor, said the mandate would cost Florida at least $1.6 billion in Medicaid alone.

All states would receive extra funding to cover Medicaid costs that are expected to rise under the reform, including 100 percent federal coverage for new enrollees under the plan through 2016.

Medicaid is the healthcare program for the poor jointly administered by the states and federal government.

(Reporting by Karen Pierog, additional reporting by Michael Connor in Miami, Jonathan Stempel in New York, Joan Gralla in New York, Lisa Lambert in Washington and Michael Peltier in Tallahassee; Editing by Andrew Hay)

[AtLast]

I think you may be right, Greyson!

The GOP is fixated on regaining power in the Congress and bringing Obama down. And it is all based in R-A-C-I-S-M!! His election has unleashed the true state of white privilege in the US. Wait until immigration reform is in the limelight, again.

This country may have passed Civil rights legislation, but, not much has really changed.


I am beginning to think "States Rights" is being used as a code word that translates into People currently in power, at the top of the food chain feeling very threatened. (I will not be explicit in saying what group is at the top of the heap.)

Since Obama became the President of the USA seems like many of my fellow Americans have become very concerned about "State Rights." However when it serves in the interest of their agenda, not a word about the Federal Government inserting its power in areas that are traditionally left to the discretion of State Government. Thinking about DOMA as a case in point.
______________________________________________



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/22/AR2010032201400.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics

States launch lawsuits against healthcare plan

Reuters
Monday, March 22, 2010; 1:21 PM



CHICAGO (Reuters) - Less than 24 hours after the House of Representatives gave final approval to a sweeping overhaul of healthcare, attorneys general from several states on Monday said they will sue to block the plan on constitutional grounds.

Republican attorneys general in 11 states warned that lawsuits will be filed to stop the federal government overstepping its constitutional powers and usurping states' sovereignty.

States are concerned the burden of providing healthcare will fall on them without enough federal support.

Ten of the attorneys general plan to band together in a collective lawsuit on behalf of Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington.

"To protect all Texans' constitutional rights, preserve the constitutional framework intended by our nation's founders, and defend our state from further infringement by the federal government, the State of Texas and other states will legally challenge the federal health care legislation," said Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, in a statement.

The Republican attorney generals say the reforms infringe on state powers under the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, who plans to file a lawsuit in federal court in Richmond, Virginia, said Congress lacks authority under its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce to force people to buy insurance. The bill also conflicts with a state law that says Virginians cannot be required to buy insurance, he added.

"If a person decides not to buy health insurance, that person by definition is not engaging in commerce," Cuccinelli said in recorded comments. "If you are not engaging in commerce, how can the federal government regulate you?"

In addition to the pending lawsuits, bills and resolutions have been introduced in at least 36 state legislatures seeking to limit or oppose various aspects of the reform plan through laws or state constitutional amendments, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

So far, only two states, Idaho and Virginia, have enacted laws, while an Arizona constitutional amendment is seeking voter approval on the November ballot. But the actual enactment of the bill by President Barack Obama could spur more movement on the measures by state lawmakers.

As is the case on the Congressional level, partisan politics is in play on the state level, where no anti-health care reform legislation has emerged in Democrat-dominated states like Illinois and New York, according to the NCSL.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, a Republican candidate running for governor, said the mandate would cost Florida at least $1.6 billion in Medicaid alone.

All states would receive extra funding to cover Medicaid costs that are expected to rise under the reform, including 100 percent federal coverage for new enrollees under the plan through 2016.

Medicaid is the healthcare program for the poor jointly administered by the states and federal government.

(Reporting by Karen Pierog, additional reporting by Michael Connor in Miami, Jonathan Stempel in New York, Joan Gralla in New York, Lisa Lambert in Washington and Michael Peltier in Tallahassee; Editing by Andrew Hay)

[Corkey]

Our states AG is one of those racists who are filing that lawsuit. He doesn't come up for re election for another 3 years, in the mean time he is screwing our state out of badly needed health care. Too long to wait to remove the asshat. So going to write the bastard. Can one tell I'm fuming?

[Greyson]

Our states AG is one of those racists who are filing that lawsuit. He doesn't come up for re election for another 3 years, in the mean time he is screwing our state out of badly needed health care. Too long to wait to remove the asshat. So going to write the bastard. Can one tell I'm fuming?



Indeed. I thought I saw fumes bouncing off of my computer monitor. Maybe we should go watch the Womens Basketball Playoffs with Toughy? Looking for the Blood Pressure cuff, now!

[Corkey]

Indeed. I thought I saw fumes bouncing off of my computer monitor. Maybe we should go watch the Womens Basketball Playoffs with Toughy? Looking for the Blood Pressure cuff, now!

LOL thanks I needed the laugh, found our cuff, gonna have a beer first to bring my bp back to acceptable levels :shocking:

[Gemme]

A 15-year-old Florida girl is in a medically-induced coma after being brutally beaten by a 13-year-old boy, an incident that allegedly stemmed from a text-message exchange.

Wayne Treacy was reportedly trying to reach his ex-girlfriend -- 13-year-old Kayla Manson, who didn't have a text-message-enabled phone -- through her friend, Josie Lou Ratley. Treacy allegedly became enraged after Ratley reportedly told him that she didn't approve of the relationship and made disparaging remarks about Treacy's brother, who'd committed suicide last year, the Today show reports.

According to CBS4, Treacy rode his bike to Deerfield Beach Middle School to confront Ratley. Since he'd never met her face-to-face before, he reportedly asked Manson to point her out. When he found Ratley, the boy, wearing steel-toed boots, began kicking and stomping her, Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti tells CBS 4.

According to an affidavit, "Upon knocking her to the ground the defendant stood over her and began to strike her head on the ground, face down five or six times. While the victim lay defenseless and motionless, the defendant stood over her and kicked her in the head five to seven times with steel-toed boots," CBS 4 reports

Treacy and Manson, who is being charged as an accessory in the attempted murder of Ratley, are being held in a juvenile detention center. Treacy has been charged with attempted first-degree murder, CBS4 reports.

"She is in an induced coma. Part of her skull has been removed to allow the swelling in her brain to go down, and she's black and blue from head to toe," says Rick Freedman, the Ratley family's attorney.

This is the second time in recent months that tragedy has struck Deerfield Beach Middle School. Michael Brewer, 15, was set on fire by classmates last October.

[Greyson]

I am stunned. What kind of society have we participated in fostering? When is enough enough? Some how we, yes we, all of us have created, let happen, did nothing to change it.

Somewhere this 13 year old boy got the idea that it is acceptable to beat the life out of another human being. It does not escape my attention that he assaulted a girl. Also, the other girl stood by passively and identified the other young girl to her "boyfriend."

I believe all of us as a part of a society have some amount of responsibility to advance the well being of civilization in some way. We can no longer just lament how terrible things are and do nothing.

How do I conduct myself?
Am I part of the solution?
Do I offer any of my time, money or other resources to the betterment of others?
Do I work on my own personal fears, resentments and prejudices or do I just point the finger of judgement at others and go about my life with no thought of the state of the rest of the world?


A 15-year-old Florida girl is in a medically-induced coma after being brutally beaten by a 13-year-old boy, an incident that allegedly stemmed from a text-message exchange.

Wayne Treacy was reportedly trying to reach his ex-girlfriend -- 13-year-old Kayla Manson, who didn't have a text-message-enabled phone -- through her friend, Josie Lou Ratley. Treacy allegedly became enraged after Ratley reportedly told him that she didn't approve of the relationship and made disparaging remarks about Treacy's brother, who'd committed suicide last year, the Today show reports.

According to CBS4, Treacy rode his bike to Deerfield Beach Middle School to confront Ratley. Since he'd never met her face-to-face before, he reportedly asked Manson to point her out. When he found Ratley, the boy, wearing steel-toed boots, began kicking and stomping her, Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti tells CBS 4.

According to an affidavit, "Upon knocking her to the ground the defendant stood over her and began to strike her head on the ground, face down five or six times. While the victim lay defenseless and motionless, the defendant stood over her and kicked her in the head five to seven times with steel-toed boots," CBS 4 reports

Treacy and Manson, who is being charged as an accessory in the attempted murder of Ratley, are being held in a juvenile detention center. Treacy has been charged with attempted first-degree murder, CBS4 reports.

"She is in an induced coma. Part of her skull has been removed to allow the swelling in her brain to go down, and she's black and blue from head to toe," says Rick Freedman, the Ratley family's attorney.

This is the second time in recent months that tragedy has struck Deerfield Beach Middle School. Michael Brewer, 15, was set on fire by classmates last October.

[Greyson]

Pentagon changes rules for discharging gays
By ANNE FLAHERTY and PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer

Thursday, March 25, 2010

(03-25) 07:47 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) --

Defense Secretary Robert Gates Thursday approved new rules that will make it harder to discharge gays from the military, calling the changes a matter of "common sense and common decency."

Gates announced new guidelines for how the Pentagon carries out the 1993 law banning gays from serving openly in the military — rules which essentially put higher-ranking officers in charge of discharge proceedings and impose tougher requirements for evidence used against gays.

The new guidelines go into effect immediately and will apply to cases already open. They are considered a stopgap measure until Congress decides whether to go along with President Barak Obama's call for a repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" law.

"I believe these changes represent an important improvement in the way the current law is put into practice, above all by providing a greater measure of common sense and common decency for handling what are complex and difficult issues for all involved," Gates told a Pentagon news conference.

The changes raise the level of officer authorized to initiate a fact-finding inquiry into a case, the level of officer who can conduct an inquiry and of the one that can authorize a dismissal.

To discourage the use of overheard statements or hearsay, from now on any evidence given in third-party outings must be given under oath, Gates said. Cases of third-party outings also have included instances in which male troops have turned in women who rejected their romantic advances or jilted partners in relationship have turned in a former lover.

Some kinds of confidential information also will no longer be allowed, including statements gays make to their lawyers, clergy, psychotherapists or medical professionals in the pursuit of health care.

The individual service branches will have 30 days to change their regulations to conform to the new rules.

Military officials, Republicans and even some conservative Democrats have been reluctant to embrace a change in the existing law. They say they support Gates' review of the policy but that no changes should be made if they might undermine military cohesion and effectiveness.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and other Democrats say the time has come to repeal the ban and have called for an immediate moratorium on dismissals.

Nathaniel Frank, a senior research fellow with the Palm Center, which supports a repeal of the ban, said it is unclear how much of an impact the new guidelines would have because regulations already restrict third-party allegations.

"Anything that continues to allow the discharge of service members for something that research shows has no bearing on military effectiveness will not go far enough," Frank said.

An estimated 13,000 have been discharged under the law. The Pentagon didn't officially begin tallying discharges until a few years after the law was implemented, and official figures show roughly 11,000 discharged since 1997 with the peak in 2001 before the military became strained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

___

AP Broadcast Correspondent Sagar Meghani contributed to this report.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/03/23/national/w113110D52.DTL

[Mitmo01]

Good its about time that the military woke up and smelled the coffee, its not like gays havent always been i nthe military anyway and at this point they need everyone they can get including us

[Andrew, Jr.]

Gemme,

What happened to the young boy who was set on fire from the same school? Is he doing ok?

I just worry about my great nephews going to school nowadays. The hate and discrimination is so high lately. You try to raise kids right, but once out in the public, you just don't know anymore. Heck, I don't know myself.

[Gemme]

Gemme,

What happened to the young boy who was set on fire from the same school? Is he doing ok?

I just worry about my great nephews going to school nowadays. The hate and discrimination is so high lately. You try to raise kids right, but once out in the public, you just don't know anymore. Heck, I don't know myself.


I honestly don't know, Andrew. The news dropped the story once the shock of it decreased and I haven't heard anything since. I might be able to do some research and see if I can find anything else about his current condition.

[Gemme]

Gemme,

What happened to the young boy who was set on fire from the same school? Is he doing ok?

I just worry about my great nephews going to school nowadays. The hate and discrimination is so high lately. You try to raise kids right, but once out in the public, you just don't know anymore. Heck, I don't know myself.



POMPANO BEACH - Touched by the plight of the Deerfield Beach teenager who was recently surrounded by schoolmates and set on fire, donors continue to come forward to support Michael Brewer and his family.

In one night this week, patrons and staff at Galuppi's in Pompano Beach raised more than $10,000 for the fund set up by Neighbors 4 Neighbors. Organizers of that event said it would seem minor compared to what they're planning for Nov. 21, when the restaurant will host a benefit featuring Miami Dolphins players and cheerleaders, along with silent auctions and raffles for sports memorabilia, Florida Panthers hockey skybox tickets, and, the grand prize, a Norwegian Cruise Lines cruise for two.

Joe Kessling, a Broward Sheriff's detective acting independently to organize the fundraiser, said he's lost sleep ever since hearing about what happened to Michael, a seventh-grader at Deerfield Beach Middle School. The last time he set his mind to fundraising, he helped raise $30,000 to send a dying firefighter on a trip to China.

Michael's great-aunt, Patti Gendron, said the 15-year-old's mother, Valerie Brewer, told her that she intends to send a thank-you note to everyone who has sent a donation to the family. "You're going to have to buy about 20,000 thank-you cards," Gendron quipped.

Valerie Brewer also is putting a scrapbook together to show her son how concern for his recovery easily expanded beyond the boundaries of South Florida.

Michael remains in critical condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital's Burn Center in Miami. The five teenagers accused of accosting him at an apartment complex on Oct. 12, dousing him with rubbing alcohol and lighting him on fire are due in court Monday. Prosecutors are expected to request an extension to file formal charges Nov. 11.

Keeping track of the donations hasn't been easy. Shortly after the incident, a family friend set up a "Michael Brewer Foundation" account at Bank of America, which quickly collected several thousand dollars.

That money, according to the family, can only go toward medical bills. The family soon redirected donations to Neighbors 4 Neighbors, a charity operated by CBS-4. The fund, said Neighbors 4 Neighbors Executive Director Lynne Cameron, permits more flexibility in how the money is spent, overseen by an established charity.

"These donations are going toward the kinds of things that don't get paid for" with insurance money, Cameron said. Examples include transportation, occupational and speech therapy, and other long-term needs Michael will face. "His real battle will begin when he's released from the hospital," Cameron said.

Donations for Michael are also coming into the Jackson Memorial Foundation.

The Brewer family is aware of the Nov. 21 fundraiser and is supporting the effort.

Other upcoming benefits include:
Firehouse Subs is collecting money at its 13 South Florida locations through Sunday, Nov. 1.
CJ's Draft House at 1825 W. Hillsboro Blvd. is hosting a family-themed fundraiser Saturday, Nov. 7, from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.
The American Veterans Post 1939 at 1448 N. State Road 7 in Margate will host a fundraiser Saturday, Nov. 7, starting at 1 p.m.
The Road Warriors First Inaugural Poker Run is scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 15 at 10:15 a.m. starting in Doral. (For information, call 754-245-1516)

The link below will take to the page where I found this article and also give pictures of Michael before and after and of the 5 accused of doing this to him. They're rotten; absolutely rotten inside.


http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/deerfield/sfl-brewer-burned-teen-b103009,0,1398220.story

[SuperFemme]

UPDATE - One week after middle school beating, mother of comatose girl hopes for a miracle

Thursday March 25 2010, 4:21pm


FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (MCT) - Hilda Goaty Ratley is hoping for a miracle. Any sign of improvement in the condition of her daughter, Josie Lou Ratley, will do. So far, nothing.

Josie Ratley, 15, remains in a medically induced coma at Broward General Medical Center, more than a week after prosecutors say an enraged teenager she barely knew confronted her at a Deerfield Beach Middle School bus stop and repeatedly stomped on her head while wearing steel-toed boots.


“I want my child to come home,” Hilda Ratley said Wednesday at the hospital. “This whole experience has been a nightmare.”

Ratley said she was able to find some encouragement on Tuesday during a hospital visit from Michael Brewer, 15, a one-time classmate of her daughter’s who recently survived a life-threatening assault. Brewer suffered burns over two-thirds of his body when he was set on fire at an apartment complex about a mile from the school last October.

Surprising doctors, Brewer staged an impressive recovery and was out of the hospital before Christmas. Doctors recently told him he won’t need to check in with them for six months, though he still undergoes physical therapy.

Brewer and Josie Ratley once shared a science class at Deerfield Middle.
“She’s my friend,” Brewer said, according to family spokeswoman Terri Lynn. The visit was a private meeting between families, Lynn said. “Their message was, ‘We’re here for you. We know what you’re going through.’ “

Hilda Ratley said she was grateful to Brewer’s parents and grandmother for offering tips to help them through her daughter’s hospitalization, including recording familiar voices to play at Josie Ratley’s bedside.

“They’re wonderful people,” Hilda Ratley said of the Brewers. “They’ve given us a little bit of hope.”

Josie Ratley was waiting for a school bus on campus March 17 when, prosecutors say, Wayne Treacy, 15, attacked her without warning. Treacy is facing a first-degree attempted murder charge and is being held in a juvenile detention center.

Also being held as an accomplice is a 13-year-old friend who prosecutors say knew Treacy intended to harm Ratley and led him to the victim.

The girl’s lawyer, Jonathon Marne, has said she did not take Treacy’s threat to harm Ratley seriously and did not witness the attack.

Other friends of Treacy said Wednesday they knew he sometimes struggled to control his anger, but they never would have expected him to follow through on a threat of violence. The Broward Sheriff’s Office said Treacy was incensed by text messages Ratley sent that made “disparaging” references to his brother, who committed suicide last October.

[Andrew, Jr.]

Gemme and Superfemme,

Thank you both for posting the updates on these kids. I shake my head at how people behave today. I just don't get it. These kids know right from wrong. And they still go after their peers. Horrible. :censor:

[SuperFemme]

From what I understand the boy who attacked this girl has a disturbing home life. I hear that his ONE person he could count on was his brother, who killed himself last year. Where are this boys parents?

The 13 year old girl had her "Legal Guardian" and her Grandma appear on her behalf on the Today Show this morning. Again, where is her Momma? Her Father?

With millions of people in the US in prison, we continue to see the fallout of broken families in the form of the children left behind IMO. (Not that I know any of the parents were ever in jail, but I'd be willing to bet).

In this economy funds for programs are being cut or completely discontinued.

We are leaving our children (by OUR I mean...it takes a village) without good role models, people that CARE where they are or whom they are dating.

It is a travesty for all the young people involved, and I hope to God somebody finds out what in the hell is really going on at DeerField Middle School. For instance, is there a student resource center? Boys & Girls Club, YMCA or anything? How is bullying dealt with there?

I want some answers. For real.

[Rook]

The news has been relentlessly bad for the Pope. Two weeks ago, Germany was scandalized by revelations that a pedophile priest was allowed to work again with children after being transferred in 1980 to the Archdiocese of Munich, which was then headed by the future Pontiff. Over the weekend, an apology the Pope issued for sexual abuse by Irish priests was deemed insufficient by many of the victims. Now the New York Times has run an article accusing Pope Benedict XVI, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of the Vatican's doctrinal office, of not responding to requests in 1996 from the Archbishop of Milwaukee to have a priest stripped of his clerical status for alleged sexual abuse of some 200 deaf boys decades before.

As the Times posted its story on the accused priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who died in 1998, the Holy See responded on the Web. In a statement linked on the Vatican's brand new Twitter account, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Papal spokesman, declared, "By sexually abusing children who were hearing-impaired, Father Murphy violated the law and, more importantly, the sacred trust that his victims had placed in him." But Lombardi defended the decision not to remove Murphy from the "clerical state," saying the priest was "elderly and in very poor health" and that he was "living in seclusion, and no allegations of abuse had been reported in over 20 years." Lombardi explained that the doctrinal office thought it wiser that church authorities in Wisconsin simply restrict Murphy's ministry and require him to take responsibility for his actions. Lombardi pointed out that earlier charges brought against Murphy by civil authorities were eventually dropped and insisted that, despite the Times allegation that the Vatican fought to keep the Murphy details confidential, the Holy See's rules did not require that such cases be kept secret.

The Times obtained the relevant documents from attorneys representing five victims of Murphy's in a civil suit against the Milwaukee Archdiocese. Former Archbishop of Milwaukee Rembert Weakland, who resigned in 2002 after revelations of an earlier relationship with another man, told the Times he brought the Murphy case to Rome in 1996 to try to bring healing to the victims. But Ratzinger's then deputy in the doctrinal office, Tarcisio Bertone, who is now Benedict's No. 2 man in the Vatican, agreed with a letter the ailing Murphy wrote asking to be allowed to live out his life "in the dignity of my priesthood," noting his ill health and the years that had passed since the accusations. After about two years of back-and-forth arguments, according to the Times, Bertone told the Milwaukee Archdiocese to take "pastoral" rather than disciplinary action regarding Murphy. The priest died soon after, at the age of 72, and was buried in his clerical vestments.

Officials in the church staunchly continue to defend the Pope. They say Benedict has pushed for far greater transparency and penitence than his predecessor, and certainly more than many of the local bishops who should have been the ones managing the individual cases. And so far, each new revelation from Ratzinger's past seems to show more administrative detachment than bad judgment from the future Pope — though that is still a surprising hands-off management style for the man who would earn a reputation as a micromanager as he rose to become the éminence grise in John Paul II's Vatican.

Vatican officials feel more and more convinced that there is a concerted campaign to damage the Catholic Church and its supreme leader. A senior official reacted with disgust after reading the latest article, saying, "It's obvious the New York Times has its mind made up. You have to ask why they didn't print a story earlier this month on the conviction of a Jewish rabbi in Brooklyn on eight counts of sex abuse." The official also referred to a libel case against Oprah Winfrey that involved sex-abuse allegations that was settled quietly on Wednesday. "But then why the front page for this story? They are targeting the Pope. There's a bloodlust for attacking the Catholic Church. We have to look at these cases one by one. There is plenty of embarrassment to go around: district attorneys, school teachers — take your pick."

Still, the Pope is the Pope, a global leader with very few equals in terms of pomp, history and circumstance. His links, however indirect, to specific cases of sexual abuse will necessarily catch the attention of both Catholics and non-Catholics. Another priest acknowledged that Benedict being specifically named in the Milwaukee and German cases just makes the news all the more troubling. "It's so volatile right now," he says. "Many of the faithful who were losing confidence in their bishops, now, it's in the Church Universal. What you read in paper: it's a real crucifixion for everybody."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1975351,00.html?xid=rss-fullworld-yahoo#ixzz0jEPn5Sfb

:rant:

[Greyson]

:rant:


-------I agree.-------

[SuperFemme]

The pope wears a dress. :fishswim:

[Rook]

If gay service members are allowed to serve openly, the military will face another tough question: Should gay partners be entitled to military benefits?

Momentum appears to be building for ending the ban on gays in the military. New rules ordered Thursday by Defense Secretary Robert Gates make it harder to discharge men and women under the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell." His decision is intended as a stopgap measure as Congress weighs whether to go along with President Barack Obama's request to repeal the law.

Since the draft ended in 1973, spousal benefits have increasingly been used as an incentive to recruit and retain an effective force. Today, more than half of all troops sport a wedding ring.

Benefits for married service members include college tuition for a spouse and the right of a spouse to be at a wounded service member's bedside. Spouses also have access to military health care and commissaries worldwide, and married service members receive better housing and even extra pay when they go to war.

The ticket to qualifying for those benefits is a marriage certificate. Heterosexual couples have a choice whether to marry, but same-sex marriages are legal in only five states and Washington, D.C. Whether same-sex partnerships would be recognized by the military and what benefits might be afforded gay couples would become issues if the ban were lifted.

"It will be a whole complex row of dominoes that will fall as a result of this," said Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow for policy studies at the conservative Family Research Council.

Already, Gates has included the issue of benefits in a review of how to lift the repeal, which is due Dec. 1.

Repealing the ban without offering same-sex partner benefits would be like telling gay service members they are equal but not giving them all the advantages of service, said Tiffany Belle, 33, of Long Beach, Calif., a lesbian and former sailor. "You're basically letting us be free being ourselves in the military, but then you're not letting us reap the benefits."

The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. Nathaniel Frank, a senior research fellow at the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said it's unrealistic to think the military would be out front of the rest of the government in offering benefits to unmarried partners.

"They don't do it for straight people, and they're very unlikely to do it for gay people," Frank said.

But, in addition to repealing "don't ask, don't tell," Obama has called for getting rid of the Defense of Marriage Act and has moved to extend some federal benefits to same-sex partners.

Obama has approved small changes in benefits available to same-sex couples who work for the federal government, such as visitation and dependent-care rights. The State Department extended benefits to gay diplomats, such as the right for their domestic partners to hold diplomatic passports and for paid travel to and from foreign posts.

Larry Korb, a senior fellow at the Democratic-led Center for American Progress, who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the early 1980s, said what the military would have to work through is similar to what the State Department and some federal agencies have done.

"My own personal view is that if they want to make it happen, they can," Korb said.

U.S. military officials are concerned that recruitment might suffer if they open the door to gay service members and their families. They worry that the Southern, Christian base from which the military relies heavily to fill its ranks will resist the change.

But if they don't adequately address the benefits issue, it could lead to gay service members leaving the military because there's no provision for caring for their families, said Ryan Gallucci, a spokesman for the veterans group AMVETS.

"They won't be on equal footing as their heterosexual counterparts," Gallucci said.

Some repeal proponents say that lifting the ban should be the focus, not the what ifs related to benefits. They say discussions about whether the Pentagon would recognize gay troops' partners aren't relevant now.

"Let's get rid of the ban first and then look at those issues," said Kevin Nix, a spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which seeks to repeal the law.

Frank, who has written a book about the policy, said opponents of repeal use a "thorny questions" strategy to make the process of lifting the ban seem far more complicated than it is by bringing up issues like benefits.

One former service member who is watching the debate is Melanie Costa, 34, of Franklin, Mass. The Iraq veteran said she left the military after four years in the Marines and six in the Army Reserves so she could marry a woman in Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal. She said if the repeal is dropped she'll re-enlist — if her wife gets benefits.

"If I got deployed, and she wasn't able to get all the benefits as another married couple, there's not really a point," Costa said.

[Jess]

The pope wears a dress. :fishswim:


working on getting the groovy hat and red pradas bequeathed to me :praying:

[Andrew, Jr.]

:blueheels:


Jess,

Those red shoes would look fabulous on you! What do you think about me? I have Fred Flintstone feet. Wide at the toes and narrow at the heel. Too much with the red? We both can pull off the hat. We are two ol' queer guys. I think any hat would look stunning on us!

[socialjustice_fsu]

to attack the police by luring them to a police funeral by the Hutaree christian militia (Michigan). Just when one thinks a human can only go so low holes are once again shot in that theory. I have been in the business for quite a while of helping prosecute some of the perpetrators of hate crimes but, I will be damned, this beats it all. In the name of christianity? ...I do believe these folks have gone off the proverbial cliff of insanity and my guess is there will be many more of these followers to be uncovered. I promise you...this is just the start of these kinds of things becoming known to the public. These groups have been orchestrating a number of attacks and they are right out our backdoor. I have no intent to feed paranoia... but what I want to do is ask that you be aware. There are a number of sites that track hate crimes/gang activity/militia movements and so on...becoming familiar with something of this nature just makes good sense.

[SuperFemme]

to attack the police by luring them to a police funeral by the Hutaree christian militia (Michigan). Just when one thinks a human can only go so low holes are once again shot in that theory. I have been in the business for quite a while of helping prosecute some of the perpetrators of hate crimes but, I will be damned, this beats it all. In the name of christianity? ...I do believe these folks have gone off the proverbial cliff of insanity and my guess is there will be many more of these followers to be uncovered. I promise you...this is just the start of these kinds of things becoming known to the public. These groups have been orchestrating a number of attacks and they are right out our backdoor. I have no intent to feed paranoia... but what I want to do is ask that you be aware. There are a number of sites that track hate crimes/gang activity/militia movements and so on...becoming familiar with something of this nature just makes good sense.

I read that story and was like WTF? Then I was scared.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/feds_release_details_in_hutaree_arrests.php

[Jess]

to attack the police by luring them to a police funeral by the Hutaree christian militia (Michigan). Just when one thinks a human can only go so low holes are once again shot in that theory. I have been in the business for quite a while of helping prosecute some of the perpetrators of hate crimes but, I will be damned, this beats it all. In the name of christianity? ...I do believe these folks have gone off the proverbial cliff of insanity and my guess is there will be many more of these followers to be uncovered. I promise you...this is just the start of these kinds of things becoming known to the public. These groups have been orchestrating a number of attacks and they are right out our backdoor. I have no intent to feed paranoia... but what I want to do is ask that you be aware. There are a number of sites that track hate crimes/gang activity/militia movements and so on...becoming familiar with something of this nature just makes good sense.

I am equally as concerned with the recent movement of "preppers" being confused for militant separatists. There has been a huge growth in folks concerned with being self contained, ie: "prepared" for disasters ( both natural and man-made) and I do fear that we may be misconstrued for the armed to to teeth resistance people found in Hutaree or Waco or Ruby Ridge. How do the sites that "track" make distinctions? Coz, I certainly do not want to be sought out as a right winged wacko just because I search info on building compost tumblers or solar power sources or arming myself safely.

[SuperFemme]

An open letter to conservatives. clicky >>>Here (http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/a/m/americandad/2010/03/an-open-letter-to-conservative.php?ref=mp)<<< to read.

[Corkey]

An open letter to conservatives. clicky >>>Here (http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/a/m/americandad/2010/03/an-open-letter-to-conservative.php?ref=mp)<<< to read.

I want to print that and hand it to my in-laws.

[SuperFemme]

Last weekend, as the House of Representatives gathered to debate health care reform while Tea Partiers protested outside the Capitol, word emerged that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spit on by one of the demonstrators.


Cleaver released a statement (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/20/tea-party-protests-nier-f_n_507116.html) confirming the incident, but some questioned his claims. Fox News personality Sean Hannity asked (http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201003240072) if there was any evidence proving that it had actually happened, and Tea Party groups offered a cash reward for proof (http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2010/03/tea-party-groups-offer-15k-reward-for-spitting-incident-proof.html).


Now video has emerged. Take a look and judge for yourself:


YouTube- Congressman Emanuel Cleaver spit on by teabagger before healthcare vote - new video!

[UofMfan]

I would be willing to bet that FOX News won't be airing this video.



Last weekend, as the House of Representatives gathered to debate health care reform while Tea Partiers protested outside the Capitol, word emerged that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spit on by one of the demonstrators.


Cleaver released a statement (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/20/tea-party-protests-nier-f_n_507116.html) confirming the incident, but some questioned his claims. Fox News personality Sean Hannity asked (http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201003240072) if there was any evidence proving that it had actually happened, and Tea Party groups offered a cash reward for proof (http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2010/03/tea-party-groups-offer-15k-reward-for-spitting-incident-proof.html).


Now video has emerged. Take a look and judge for yourself:


YouTube- Congressman Emanuel Cleaver spit on by teabagger before healthcare vote - new video! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmP4Gb2pEsY)

[SuperFemme]

I would be willing to bet that FOX News won't be airing this video.


I want to tape Hannity's eyeballs open and force him to watch it on loop. For the duration of one of his show's. I'd like the show to have a grand finale that includes the Tea Bagger's that offered a cash reward for *proof* handing over a check to the videographer. j

What the fuck is wrong with people in this country that they will believe people like Hannity, O'Reilly, Limbaugh and Palin?

[UofMfan]

I want to tape Hannity's eyeballs open and force him to watch it on loop. For the duration of one of his show's. I'd like the show to have a grand finale that includes the Tea Bagger's that offered a cash reward for *proof* handing over a check to the videographer. j

What the fuck is wrong with people in this country that they will believe people like Hannity, O'Reilly, Limbaugh and Palin?

I am with you!

My theory is not suitable for posting, lol

[UofMfan]

Ha! She certainly has her priorities straight :)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/03/marion-zock-82yearold-wom_n_524476.html

[Tommi]

More earthquakes following 6.9 shaker.

Cats scattered, along with cards and pictures that fell from TV and bookcases.

= PRELIMINARY EARTHQUAKE REPORT ==

Region: BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO
Geographic coordinates: 32.093N, 115.249W
Magnitude: 6.9 Ml
Depth: 32 km

Time near the Epicenter: 4 Apr 2010 15:40:39
ADDITIONAL EARTHQUAKE PARAMETERS
________________________________
event ID : CI 14607652

This is a computer-generated message and has not yet been reviewed by a
seismologist.
For subsequent updates, maps, and technical information, see:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/ci14607652.php
or
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/

[Tommi]

More earthquakes following 6.9 shaker.

Cats scattered, along with cards and pictures that fell from TV and bookcases.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/ci14607652.php
= PRELIMINARY EARTHQUAKE REPORT ==

Region: BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO
Geographic coordinates: 32.093N, 115.249W
Magnitude: 6.9 Ml
Depth: 32 km

Time near the Epicenter: 4 Apr 2010 15:40:39
ADDITIONAL EARTHQUAKE PARAMETERS
________________________________
event ID : CI 14607652

This is a computer-generated message and has not yet been reviewed by a
seismologist.
For subsequent updates, maps, and technical information, see:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/ci14607652.php
or
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/

Kiss your loved ones and have H2o...Do you have contacts out of state?

[Corkey]

So far they are saying, no damages. In the US that is, don't know about folks in Mexico. There was another 4. 1 in NorCal.
Ok not the big one.
After shock 5.1 near Imperial Ca. San Andres is active always.

[Logicaly]

Tommi everything okay down there? Bay Area didn't feel anything from any of the quakes.

[Tommi]

Tommi everything okay down there? Bay Area didn't feel anything from any of the quakes.

All good so far. We rolled north & south, then east n west..It was circular.
My Tigger cat is sick to her tummy.

No major damage reported yet. Elect. power poles down.

Elevator stuck @ Disney hotel

We are still rolling. another after shock just hit Chandelier swinging. Cats scurrying.Gas lines and water okay

..yuck.

[Logicaly]

Keep us updated and stay safe as well!

[Andrew, Jr.]

I just heard on the news that a Chinese registered ship, Shen Neng 1, is leaking oil close to The Great Barrier Reef. It is loaded with 65,000 tons of coal headed to China. The captain was taking a short-cut and went out of the shipping lane and ran aground. And thus...one of the world's greatest santucaries is in danger of being destroyed by leaking oil.

News like this just pisses me off. :mad::angry:

:explode::annoyed:

[MsDemeanor]

The 4.1 was in Malibu, not in Nor Cal.

[Corkey]

CNN reported NorCal. So they have changed the report.

[Luv]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/04/04/mexico.earthquake/index.html?hpt=T1

[MsDemeanor]

Red Sox beat Evil Empire in Baseball Season Opener!!!!

[Nat]

RICHMOND, Va. — Gov. Bob McDonnell has conceded a "major omission" for not noting slavery in declaring April Confederate History Month in Virginia.

As part of his mea culpa, McDonnell inserted into the proclamation a paragraph condemning slavery as "evil and inhumane" and blaming it as the cause of the Civil War.

In a 400-word statement issued by his office, McDonnell said the failure to include a slavery reference was a mistake and apologized to any Virginian who might have been offended or disappointed.

On Tuesday, McDonnell said in a telephone news conference that he wasn't focused on slavery in drafting the decree but on Civil War history.

More Civil War battles were fought in Virginia than any other state, and Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy.

linky (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hW_QgDWbONZWZQILbVnwlXU4yJwgD9EUGGM03)

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

A major earthquake has shaken Indonesia's northwest island of Sumatra, prompting a brief tsunami warning and sending residents rushing for higher ground.

The U.S. Geological Survey says a 7.7 magnitude earthquake occurred at sea about 215 kilometers northwest of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The quake was felt throughout northern Sumatra and in Malaysia. Local news reports say that patients from some area hospitals were evacuated and that some residents fled to high ground in case of a tsunami. Electricity in some areas was cut off but so far no major damage has been reported.

linky (http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/Earthquake-Shakes-Indonesia-90045967.html)

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

Wis. DA Threatens Arrest for Local Sex-Ed Teachers

A Wisconsin district attorney is urging schools to drop their sex-education programs, warning that the teachers involved could be arrested if they follow a new state law requiring them to instruct students on how to use condoms and other contraceptives.

The state law, called the Healthy Youth Act, took effect in March. Starting this fall, it requires schools with sex-education courses to teach students medically accurate, age-appropriate information, including how to use birth control and prevent sexually transmitted diseases. It also requires the classes to include information about how to recognize signs of abuse and how alcohol can affect decision making.

Parents will be permitted to remove their children from sex-education classes, as they could under previous state law. Schools also will be allowed the choice of whether to offer sex education, but must notify parents if they decide not to.

In his letter, Southworth told school district leaders the new law promotes sexual assault of children, and warns that teachers who follow the law could be charged with misdemeanor or felony delinquency of a minor, with maximum punishments ranging from nine months in jail to six years in prison.

"For example, if a teacher instructs any student aged 16 or younger how to utilize contraceptives under circumstances where the teacher knows the child is engaging in sexual activity with another child -- or even where the 'natural and probable consequences' of the teacher's instruction is to cause that child to engage in sexual intercourse with a child -- that teacher can be charged under this statue," Southworth wrote.

linky (http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/wis-da-threatens-arrest-for-local-sex-ed-teachers/19430578)

[Tommi]

April 9, 2010 | 11:51 AM ET
Breaking: Obama to Address Stevens Retirement at 1:20 p.m.

President Obama will address the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens in his previously scheduled remarks on the West Virginia mine tragedy. Watch it LIVE now!

Major Garrett reports that a representative from the Supreme Court delivered a letter to the White House at 10:30 a.m. from Justice Stevens announcing his intent to retire this summer. White House Counsel Bob Bauer connected on the phone with the President, who is traveling on Air Force One, at 10:45 a.m. to inform him about the letter.

[Tommi]

Gibbs Questions Justice Department Brief

Robert Gibbs criticized a brief filed by the Department of Justice last week defending the constitutionality of "don't ask, don't tell.


White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Tuesday put some distance between the White House and the Department of Justice in terms of the department's approach to defending "don't ask, don't tell" in a brief filed last week. Gibbs suggested it was "odd" that DOJ used Gen. Colin Powell's 1993 testimony to defend the law because Powell has since changed his views on the matter.

"Was it odd that they included previous statements from Gen. Colin Powell on a belief set that he no longer had?" Gibbs posed, in response to a question from The Advocate. "I don’t think the president would disagree with that."

Full Advocate Post * (http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/04/06/Gibbs_Impugns_DOJ_Brief/)

[Andrew, Jr.]

9/11 Remains have been found in Satin Island, NY. The remains are being analyzed & compared with the DNA given to the medical examiner by those souls who remain missing (families). Maybe some closure for some. :praying:

[Andrew, Jr.]

The Polish President and his wife have died in a plane crash in Russia. They were traveling with their enterourage. No survivors from what I have heard on the news.

[Nat]

NuOHEZcau3w

This guy is running for governor of New York. One article describes him as a "darling" of the Tea Party movement. He forwarded emails with pornographic depictions of women including a woman with a horse and he forwarded racist emails, some specifically targeting the Obamas. His basic response: "I'm not a racist. I'm sorry to the ladies I've offended. If you're a man who's never opened an explicit image on the internet, please don't vote for me."

nice. I love how he doesn't even apologize for the racism, but he does use the words "politically incorrect." (thumbs down)

Oh, and he still thinks he should be governor.

[Tommi]

GLMA is passing on this historic memorandum issued today by President Barack Obama to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) directing relevant agencies to take steps to ensure that individuals are not discriminated against in hospital settings on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The memorandum requests agencies to develop rules to protect LGBT patients and their families and address issues of hospital visitation, medical decisionmaking, or other healthcare issues.

The announcement is available http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/presidential-memorandum-hospital-visitation.

http://www.thewhitehouse-usa.com/images/WhiteHouse-Logo-small.png

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release April 15, 2010

Presidential Memorandum - Hospital Visitation


MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

SUBJECT: Respecting the Rights of Hospital Patients to Receive Visitors and to Designate Surrogate Decision Makers for Medical Emergencies

There are few moments in our lives that call for greater compassion and companionship than when a loved one is admitted to the hospital. In these hours of need and moments of pain and anxiety, all of us would hope to have a hand to hold, a shoulder on which to lean -- a loved one to be there for us, as we would be there for them.

Yet every day, all across America, patients are denied the kindnesses and caring of a loved one at their sides -- whether in a sudden medical emergency or a prolonged hospital stay. Often, a widow or widower with no children is denied the support and comfort of a good friend. Members of religious orders are sometimes unable to choose someone other than an immediate family member to visit them and make medical decisions on their behalf. Also uniquely affected are gay and lesbian Americans who are often barred from the bedsides of the partners with whom they may have spent decades of their lives -- unable to be there for the person they love, and unable to act as a legal surrogate if their partner is incapacitated.

For all of these Americans, the failure to have their wishes respected concerning who may visit them or make medical decisions on their behalf has real onsequences. It means that doctors and nurses do not always have the best information about patients' medications and medical histories and that friends and certain family members are unable to serve as intermediaries to help communicate patients' needs. It means that a stressful and at times terrifying experience for patients is senselessly compounded by indignity and unfairness. And it means that all too often, people are made to suffer or even to pass away alone, denied the comfort of companionship in their final moments while a loved one is left worrying and pacing down the hall.

Many States have taken steps to try to put an end to these problems. North Carolina recently amended its Patients' Bill of Rights to give each patient "the right to designate visitors who shall receive the same visitation privileges as the patient's immediate family members, regardless of whether the visitors are legally related to the patient" -- a right that applies in every hospital in the State. Delaware, Nebraska, and Minnesota have adopted similar laws.

My Administration can expand on these important steps to ensure that patients can receive compassionate care and equal treatment during their hospital stays. By this memorandum, I request that you take the following steps:

1. Initiate appropriate rulemaking, pursuant to your authority under 42 U.S.C. 1395x and other relevant provisions of law, to ensure that hospitals that participate in Medicare or Medicaid respect the rights of patients to designate visitors. It should be made clear that designated visitors, including individuals designated by legally valid advance directives (such as durable powers of attorney and health care proxies), should enjoy visitation privileges that are no more restrictive than those that immediate family members enjoy. You should also provide that participating hospitals may not deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national
origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. The rulemaking should take into account the need for hospitals to restrict visitation in medically appropriate circumstances as well as the clinical decisions that medical professionals make about a patient's care or treatment.

2. Ensure that all hospitals participating in Medicare or Medicaid are in full compliance with regulations, codified at 42 CFR 482.13 and 42 CFR 489.102(a), promulgated to guarantee that all patients' advance directives, such as durable powers of attorney and health care proxies, are respected, and that patients' representatives otherwise have the right to make informed decisions regarding patients' care. Additionally, I request that you issue new guidelines, pursuant to your
authority under 42 U.S.C. 1395cc and other relevant provisions of law, and provide technical assistance on how hospitals participating in Medicare or Medicaid can best comply with the regulations and take any additional appropriate measures to fully enforce the regulations.

3. Provide additional recommendations to me, within 180 days of the date of this memorandum, on actions the Department of Health and Human Services can take to address hospital visitation, medical decisionmaking, or other health care issues that affect LGBT patients and their families.

This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

You are hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

[UofMfan]

Goldman Sachs FRAUD Charges Filed By SEC Over Subprime Mortgage Securities
AP/Huffington Post

The government has accused Goldman Sachs of defrauding investors by failing to disclose conflicts of interest in mortgage investments it sold as the housing market was faltering.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Friday civil fraud charges against the Wall Street powerhouse and one of its executives. The agency alleges Goldman failed to disclose that one of its clients helped create -- and then bet against -- subprime mortgage securities that Goldman sold to investors. In essence, Goldman is accused of pushing a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail.

Investors in the mortgage securities are alleged to have lost more than $1 billion, the SEC noted.

The SEC claims Goldman Sachs and one of its top officers misled investors by not disclosing that hedge fund manager John Pauson, who made billions betting against the housing market, selected the assets that went into a complex security called "Abacaus."

Paulson & Co. is one of the world's largest hedge funds, and paid Goldman roughly $15 million for structuring these deals in 2007.

"The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen," finance expert Sylvain R. Raynes told the New York Times about such deals. "When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else's house and then committing arson."

Goldman Sachs shares fell more than 10 percent after the SEC announcement.

[MsDemeanor]

I'm glad that the SEC finally got around to filing charges. I also wish that I had put in a stop loss order on my bank stocks last night *ouch*

[UofMfan]

Arkansas Adoption Ban Overturned: Law Kept Unmarried Straight, Gay Couples From Adopting

CHUCK BARTELS, Huffington Post


LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A state judge on Friday struck down an Arkansas law approved by voters that banned gay couples and other unmarried people living together from serving as adoptive or foster parents.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza said in a two-page ruling that people in "non-marital relationships" are forced to choose between becoming an adoptive parent and sustaining that relationship.

"Due process and equal protection are not hollow words without substance," Piazza said. "They are rights enumerated in our constitution that must not be construed in such a way as to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people."

A group of families, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, sued in 2008 to overturn the ban. They argued that there are too few families willing to adopt or foster in Arkansas, which has an average of 1,600 children on waiting lists, and that good homes were being arbitrarily cut from the list.

The law effectively banned gays and lesbians from adopting or fostering children because they are unable to legally marry in Arkansas.

Piazza, a former prosecutor, agreed with claims by families who said the ban lessened the number of available adoptive and foster parents to the point where thousands of children could go without homes.

He said the ban cast "an unreasonably broad net" and did not serve the state's interest.

Holly Dickson, a lawyer with the Arkansas chapter of the ACLU who represented the families, said Piazza's ruling opens many homes for children who need them.

"We hope to see the state screening everyone that could be a potential good parent," Dickson said.

Gov. Mike Beebe's office said it would review the decision with other agencies and decide what to do next. Voters had approved the measure in November 2008.

"There's a lot of things to consider. ... We're going to decide how to proceed," Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said it would take time to decide on the next step.

"My duty as attorney general is to defend the laws of this state. The attorneys in our office have done just that. Although I have never supported this act, our office has advised and defended DHS throughout this process," McDaniel said.

Jerry Cox, leader of the Arkansas Family Council, which backed the ban and helped defend it in court, said his group will appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court.

"I think (Piazza's ruling) undermines the welfare of children. ... He overruled the will of the people. It's a sad day when a judge can do that," Cox said.

The judge wrote that the law infringed upon a "fundamental right." Piazza said protecting children is in the state's interest, but the ban "is not narrowly tailored to the least restrictive means necessary to serve the state's interest in determining what is in the best interest of the child."

The Family Council got the necessary signatures to bring the ban to the ballot after the Arkansas Supreme Court in 2006 overturned a state agency ban on gays and lesbians serving as foster parents.

[UofMfan]

Civil Rights Leader Dorothy Height Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 20, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Dorothy Height, the leading female voice of the 1960s civil rights movement and a participant in historic marches with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others, died Tuesday. She was 98.

Height, whose activism on behalf of women and minorities dated to the New Deal, led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years. She continued actively speaking out into her 90s, often getting rousing ovations at events around Washington, where she was immediately recognized by the bright, colorful hats she almost always wore.

She died at Howard University Hospital, where she had been in serious condition for weeks.

In a statement, President Barack Obama called her ''the godmother of the civil rights movement'' and a hero to Americans.

''Dr. Height devoted her life to those struggling for equality ... and served as the only woman at the highest level of the Civil Rights Movement -- witnessing every march and milestone along the way,'' Obama said.

It was the second death of a major civil rights figure in less than a week. Benjamin L. Hooks, the former longtime head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died Thursday in Memphis at 85.

As a teenager, Height marched in New York's Times Square shouting, ''Stop the lynching.'' In the 1950s and 1960s, she was the leading woman helping King and other activists orchestrate the civil rights movement, often reminding the men heading the movement not to underestimate their women counterparts.

One of Height's sayings was, ''If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time.'' She liked to quote 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said that the three effective ways to fight for justice are to ''agitate, agitate, agitate.''

Height was on the platform at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting only a few feet from King, when he gave his famous ''I have a dream'' speech at the March on Washington in 1963.

''He spoke longer than he was supposed to speak,'' Height recalled in a 1997 Associated Press interview. But after he was done, it was clear King's speech would echo for generations, she said, ''because it gripped everybody.''

She lamented that the feeling of unity created by the 1963 march had faded, and that the civil rights movement of the 1990s was on the defensive and many black families were still not economically secure.

''We have come a long way, but too many people are not better off,'' she said. ''This is my life's work. It is NOT a job.''

When Obama won the presidential election in November 2008, Height told Washington TV station WTTG that she was overwhelmed with emotion.

''People ask me, did I ever dream it would happen, and I said, `If you didn't have the dream, you couldn't have worked on it,'' she said.

Height became president of the National Council of Negro Women in 1957 and held the post until 1997, when she was 85. She remained chairman of the group.

She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 from President Bill Clinton.

To celebrate Height's 90th birthday in March 2002, friends and supporters raised $5 million to enable her organization to pay off the mortgage on its Washington headquarters. The donors included Oprah Winfrey and Don King.

Height was born in Richmond, Va., and the family moved to the Pittsburgh area when she was four. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees from New York University and did postgraduate work at Columbia University and the New York School of Social Work. (She had been turned away by Barnard College because it already had its quota of two black women.)

In 1937, while she was working at the Harlem YWCA, Height met famed educator Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had come to speak at a meeting of Bethune's organization. Height eventually rose to leadership roles in both the council and the YWCA.

The late activist C. DeLores Tucker once called Height an icon to all African-American women.

''I call Rosa Parks the mother of the civil rights movement,'' Tucker said in 1997. ''Dorothy Height is the queen.''

[Nat]

Obama clashes with gay rights hecklers in L.A.

link (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts1697)

Repeal 'don't ask, don't tell'!" the protesters yelled, referring to the 1993 military policy that bans gays and lesbians from openly serving. Obama responded, "We are going to do that; hey, hold on a second, hold on a second."

The rest of the crowd then began chanting Obama's signature campaign chant: "Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!"

"When you've got an ally like Barbara Boxer and you've got an ally like me who are standing for the same thing, then you don't know exactly why you've got to holler, because we already hear you, all right," Obama remarked to applause. "I mean, it would have made more sense to holler that at the people who oppose it."

But the hollering didn't let up. "It's time for equality for all Americans," shouted one. Obama again stressed his opposition to the ban, and again said, "I don't know why you're hollering." The group broke into another "Yes we can!" chant.

Obama then sought to return to the event's main theme: Boxer's re-election. Sen. Boxer "didn't even vote for 'don't ask, don't tell' in the first place," the president noted. "So you know she's going to be in favor of repealing 'don't ask, don't tell.' "

[UofMfan]

WEDNESDAY 21 APRIL 2010

Oklahoma Senate Passes Five Controversial Abortion Bills

by: Grace Huang, t r u t h o u t | Report

The Oklahoma Senate passed five abortion bills Monday night, which opponents have said will severely limit a woman's ability to get an abortion and would entail some of the strictest anti-abortion measures in the country.

One of the bills would force a woman to get an ultrasound at least one hour prior to an abortion and be shown the image and given a detailed explanation of it, even if she wishes otherwise. A vaginal probe would be used if it would provide a clearer image of the fetus, which no other state requires; three others do require ultrasounds, but none force the woman to listen to an explanation of it.

State Sen. Anthony Sykes (R-Moore), the bill's sponsor, said the measure was designed to provide women with additional information before having an abortion.

Other pieces of legislation also require clinics that perform abortions to post signs stating it's "against the law for anyone ... to force you to have an abortion," forbid state exchange program insurance from covering abortions and prevent wrongful life and wrongful birth lawsuits.

One last bill would require the woman to first answer a lengthy questionnaire and provide information such as her age, marital status, race, education and reason for seeking an abortion. The doctor would then report this information - without the patient's name attached, however - which would be compiled and put on a state web site and accessible only by certain government personnel.

The bill's sponsor has said this would provide valuable information on who seeks abortions and why, in addition to helping create programs aimed at preventing abortions. Opponents of the bill, however, argue that this represents an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.

Jordan Goldberg, state advocacy council for the Center of Reproductive Rights (CRR), says she does not consider it "appropriate to use medical appointments and doctor-patient relationship to do fact-finding research gathering project at the expense of patient privacy."

A letter to Gov. Brad Henry (D-Oklahoma) issued by the CRR arguing unconstitutionality of the bill stated, "nothing in the Constitution or the case law allows states to require women to justify their constitutionally protected decision to terminate a pregnancy."

After debate in the state senate that spanned most of Monday, all five bills passed with large majorities, three of which passed 35-11. The three bills on ultrasounds, clinic signs and wrongful-life suits will go to the governor's desk, while the other two on information reporting and state insurance exchange will return to the House.

The Oklahoma legislature has attempted to make such abortion bills the law before. In 2008, it passed a measure that required women to get an ultrasound and hear a detailed description of it prior to having an abortion. This overrode a veto from Governor Henry, which he made on the grounds that there were no exceptions for rape or incest victims.

However, following a challenge from the CRR in 2009, an Oklahoma State District Court ruled that the law addressed too many topics and violated the state constitution's "single-subject" requirement. For the same reason, in February, another challenged law was struck down; it included a provision requiring a woman seeking an abortion to provide personal information regarding her situation and reasons for seeking an abortion.

Goldberg said that the CRR is still "weighing its options" regarding possible legal action.

Several Republican state senators said they were pleased the five abortion bills had been passed with bipartisan support.

"Senate Republicans continue to fight for life of the unborn, and we saw members from both parties join together in supporting this great cause," said Glenn Coffee (R-Oklahoma City), the state senate president pro tempore, in a statement. "Oklahomans have consistently voted and called for measures like these, and today we have held true to Oklahoma values."

Opponents focused on the role of the government and the problems they said would arise from the bills.

"The Legislature and the Senate are acting like an amateur gynecologist," State Sen. Jim Wilson (D-Tahlequah) said in an interview <http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=16&articleid=20100420_16_A1_OKLAHO444183&archive=yes>. "This is not about abortion. This is about the Bible."

"These bills are trying to prevent women in Oklahoma from access to health care and making it more difficult for physicians to provide that care," Goldberg said. "They disregard patient privacy and medical standards and are a poor public health policy."

[Nat]

LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- Two weeks removed from an emergency appendectomy, Bret Michaels was rushed to the hospital on Thursday night where it was discovered the rocker had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, a rep for the rocker confirmed to Access Hollywood.

The 47-year-old "Rock of Love" and "Celebrity Apprentice" reality star is currently listed in critical condition.

[Rook]

I wasn't fond of the "Rock of Love"
But, he was/is one of the Precious few "big hair" lead singers I viewed as being Intelligent...
Despite a few brainfarts {diabetes type 1 + booze x drugs = bad idea}
I do hope he recovers.

[Nat]

I wasn't fond of the "Rock of Love"
But, he was/is one of the Precious few "big hair" lead singers I viewed as being Intelligent...
Despite a few brainfarts {diabetes type 1 + booze x drugs = bad idea}
I do hope he recovers.

The 12-year-old-me was a fan, still is a fan deep-down. All those metal-edge magazines and the glory of pretty men with long hair - they are still lodged somewhere in my brain. The way he posed for every pic with this slightly-open playboy bunny pout on his lips and the pink lipgloss. He's lodged for good somewhere in my head.


http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/27507877/Bret+Michaels+BretMichaels8.jpg
That sort of medical event has the potential to be a very very serious brain injury and that makes me sad.

Heh. I think he's the second man I ever saw naked (in a photo) - the first being John Lennon. I remember being like, "wow, he looks weird." Of course, he looked perfectly normal, but I guess it was my first little indication that maybe I wasn't straight.

[Andrew, Jr.]

I just posted about Brett Michaels in another thread. I just cannot imagine what he family is going thru right now. This news just shakes me up. I hope and pray he survives.

[UofMfan]

Thank God for a sane Governor!

Oklahoma Abortion Bills Vetoed By Democratic Governor Brad Henry
TIM TALLEY, The Huffington Post.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry vetoed two abortion bills Friday that he said are an unconstitutional attempt by the Legislature to insert government into the private lives and decisions of citizens.

One measure would have required women to undergo an intrusive ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before getting abortions. Henry said that legislation is flawed because it does not allow rape and incest victims to be exempted.

Lawmakers who supported the vetoed measures promised an override vote in the House and Senate as early as next week. A national abortion rights group has said the ultrasound bill would have been among the strictest anti-abortion measures in the country if it had been signed into law.

Henry said "it would be unconscionable to subject rape and incest victims to such treatment" because it would victimize a victim a second time.

"State policymakers should never mandate that a citizen be forced to undergo any medical procedure against his or her will, especially when such a procedure could cause physical or mental trauma. To do so amounts to an unconstitutional invasion of privacy," he said.

Under the ultrasound legislation, doctors would have been required to use a vaginal probe in cases where it would provide a clearer picture of the fetus than a regular ultrasound. Doctors have said this is usually the case early in pregnancies, when most abortions are done.

Henry vetoed similar legislation in 2008 but was overridden by lawmakers. The bill was struck down by an Oklahoma County judge before it went into effect on the grounds that it contained multiple subjects in violation of the state Constitution.

The second abortion bill that the governor vetoed Friday was one that would have prohibited pregnant women from seeking damages if physicians withhold important information or provide inaccurate information about their pregnancy. Supporters of that measure said it was an attempt to keep pregnant women from discriminating against fetuses with disabilities.

But Henry said the bill would allow unscrupulous or negligent physicians to withhold or provide inaccurate information without facing the potential of legal consequences.

"This is a very disappointing day for Oklahomans who care about maintaining a culture of life in Oklahoma," said House Speaker Chris Benge, R-Tulsa.

Tony Lauinger, state chairman of the anti-abortion group Oklahomans for Life and vice president of the National Right to Life Committee, said each of the measures are designed to protect the unborn as well as pregnant women.

"It is just as important for a woman who is pregnant as a result of rape or incest as it is for any other woman to have the benefit of full and complete information prior to taking the irrevocable step of having her baby aborted," Lauinger said.

Stephanie Toti, an attorney for the New York-based abortion rights group, Center for Reproductive Rights, applauded the governor's vetoes. The group has said the ultrasound bill would have been among the strictest anti-abortion measures in the nation.

"The patient has no autonomy to make a decision. And the physician has no discretion," Toti said.

Henry did sign one abortion bill into law Friday: one requiring abortion clinics to post signs stating it is against the law for anyone to force a woman to have an abortion, and that an abortion will not be performed until the woman gives her voluntary consent.

Earlier this month, Henry signed three other abortion-related bills, including a ban on abortions based on the gender of the child and tighter restrictions on the use of the RU-486 abortion pill.

At least two other abortion measures are pending in the Oklahoma Legislature including one that would require pregnant women to complete a lengthy questionnaire before receiving an abortion.

[Rook]

Don't read me wrong, Loved Poison as a kid...
Amongst other big-haired/glam/metal rock bands {Twisted Sister yes, KISS...not so much, mind u, I love gene simmons reality show lol}
At the time, My reasoning was "they're the only ones I can visually see what they're screaming about, and the lyrics are nifty"..My grandmother forbade it in her home when I moved to PR & we lived with her for some time, that was pretty much the end of it for me..With the exception of bon jovi, nirvana and guns n roses {the latter 2 a bit later when I was a Teen, and "rebellious"}..one of my cousins collected iron maiden, i was fascinated with the album cover art as a kid... :thumbsup:

the naked part...I'm content with seeing him fully clothed, i think thats what turned me off from his reality show, the fact 2 of the girls got into a fight cuz one of them gave him a "blow" and the other one told the girls Father :cracked: talk about Awkward Central...[yes, I watched a few ep., it's like a trainwreck]

I'm a bit bothered they're not giving Updates as frequently as they usually do with other Artists...
They're paying more attention to tiger woods and Nike's double standards... :badmood:

[Leigh]

LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- Two weeks removed from an emergency appendectomy, Bret Michaels was rushed to the hospital on Thursday night where it was discovered the rocker had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, a rep for the rocker confirmed to Access Hollywood.

The 47-year-old "Rock of Love" and "Celebrity Apprentice" reality star is currently listed in critical condition.



My mom told Me about this last night, as it was on the front page of Yahoo Canada's home page. This saddens Me deeply because I have been a HUGE fan of Poison since they first got together and was obsessed with them alot in My younger years. Their music brings back alot of super memories, and yeah I admit that I tried not to miss an episode of the Rock of Love shows as well as I've been watching Celebrity Apprentice religiously (Bret being one of the reasons I've been watching the show like I have). I really hope that he recovers soon and that he will be okay ~ I'd be pretty upset if anything bad happened to him :blues:

[Andrew, Jr.]

Having a head injury is horrible. The aftermath is nothing short of hell, and that is putting it nicely. I would not wish it on anyone. I always tell people to go and visit a neuro rehab center and volunteer for a day. See what life is truely like for those who have head injuries.

I just hope and pray he wakes up. Sometimes it is best if one does die thou. It beats living as a vegtable.

[UofMfan]

It is nice to know stupidity is running amok worldwide.

'Gay Dog' Refused Entry To Australian Restaurant
From the Huffington Post.

An Australian restaurant has been forced to apologize and pay compensation after refusing to let a blind man enter because they thought his dog was gay.

In May 2009, Ian Jolly, 57, was attempting to dine at the Thai Spice restaurant in Adelaide, when he was refused entry after staff misheard his female companion, and thought his "guide dog" was a "gay dog."

"The staff genuinely believed that Nudge was an ordinary pet dog which had been desexed to become a gay dog," the owners said in a statement to South Australia's Equal Opportunity Tribunal.

Jolly is now set to receive a written apology and $1,400 compensation.

However, Jolly said that the situation had made him embarrassed about going to restaurants.

"I just want to be like everybody else and be able to go out for dinner, to be left alone and just enjoy a meal," he told Australian press.

[SuperFemme]

OMG. Are my dogs gay too? What does 'de-sexed' mean? If it's the same as neutering then my dogs are for sure gay. :laundryday:

[UofMfan]

OMG. Are my dogs gay too? What does 'de-sexed' mean? If it's the same as neutering then my dogs are for sure gay. :laundryday:

OK since we are gay, does that mean we must have been "de-sexed" or "neutered"? Please someone tell me when that happened because I have no such recollection!

[UofMfan]

Oklahoma Backs Abortion Restrictions
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: April 27, 2010, The New York Times

The Oklahoma Legislature voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to override vetoes of two highly restrictive abortion measures, one making it a law that women undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before having an abortion.

Though other states have passed similar measures forcing women to have ultrasounds, Oklahoma’s law goes further, requiring a doctor or technician to set up the monitor where the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims.

The second measure passed into law Tuesday protects doctors from malpractice suits if they decide not to inform the parents of a unborn baby that the fetus has birth defects. The intent of the bill is to prevent parents from later suing doctors who withhold information to try to influence them against having an abortion.

Gov. Brad Henry, a Democrat, vetoed both bills last week. The ultrasound law, he said, was flawed because it did not exempt rape and incest victims and was an unconstitutional intrusion into a woman’s privacy. He painted the other measure as immoral.

“It is unconscionable to grant a physician legal protection to mislead or misinform pregnant women in an effort to impose his or her personal beliefs on a patient,” Mr. Henry said.

The Republican majorities in both houses, however, saw things differently. On Monday, the House voted overwhelmingly to override the vetoes, and the Senate followed suit at 10:42 a.m. Tuesday, making the two measures law.

The ultrasound law was part of a bill that was struck down by the state courts last August because it violated a clause in the Oklahoma Constitution that requires bills to deal with only one subject. Republican lawmakers vowed at the time to pass it again.

This year, Republican leaders passed five separate antiabortion bills to satisfy the courts’ concerns. Mr. Henry signed one into law: it required that clinics post signs stating a woman cannot be forced to have an abortion, that an abortion cannot be performed until a woman gives her voluntary consent, and that abortions based on a child’s gender are illegal.

Two other antiabortion bills are still working their way through the legislature. One would force women to fill out a lengthy questionnaire about their reasons for seeking an abortion and then post statistics online based on the answers. The other restricts insurance coverage for the procedure.

Though many states have passed similar laws aimed at curbing abortion, with Tuesday’s action, Oklahoma appears to have become the most hostile to women seeking to end a pregnancy, said Dionne Scott, a spokeswoman for the Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group for abortion rights based in New York.

“It’s the most extreme ultrasound requirement in the country,” she said.

[Tommi]

Thu, April 29, 2010
FTMI Announces April 29 Long Beach CA Rally for Attacked FTM College Student
. FTM_International_Discussion


From FTM International: A 27-year-old transgender student at Cal State Long Beach reported he was assaulted in a university men's room near Lecture Hall 151 at 9:30 p.m. on April 15. He was pushed into a stall, had his shirt pulled over his head and had the word "IT" carved into his chest with a knife. According to the CSULB Crime Statistics from 2004 to spring 2009 shown on the University Police website, this is the first hate crime to occur at CSULB, but the second assault to occur in the past school year. Last night a PFLAG event had speakers who addressed the attack. The following is a statement the Daily 49er received from Cal State Long Beach. April 28, 2010, "Statement from Colle Carpenter, graduate student who was attacked at California State University, Long Beach on April 15 On April 15, I was attacked while on a break from class at Cal State Long Beach. Since this happened to me, I have received respect and support from the university, far beyond what I expected. The campus police have made every effort to conduct a thorough investigation and have been especially concerned with respecting my wishes for privacy and for ensuring my safety. I'm aware the university has come under criticism regarding communications and response in general, but again, I feel that the administration' s response has been focused on the investigation and my well-being. I think it's really unfair that the university is being criticized. I requested time alone to heal privately with my family and the university honored that request. The university statement was released 20 minutes after I approved the sketch of the suspect. I appreciate the outpouring of support from the community. However, some people and organizations have directed their anger and fear toward the university instead of the person who did this. I think the most important thing for everyone to understand is the need to find and prosecute the person who hurt me. I chose to return to my classes and CSULB is doing everything possible to make sure I feel safe in that decision." As part of Take Back the Night, there will be a rally April 29 at CSULB 7pm, Maxson Plaza: Speaker's Rally 8pm: March through campus 9pm, Soroptimist House: InterACT performance skit: Sexual Assault, followed by Speakout facilitated by YWCA 1250 Bellflower Boulevard Long Beach, CA

[socialjustice_fsu]

Although I have not heard the most recent update on the oil spill in the northern region of the Gulf of Mexico I am acutely aware of what is about to happen to our coast line within a matter of days, perhaps hours. I reside in Pensacola, Florida. We have the whitest beaches and the most pristine sapphire waters in the southeast and likely in the entire United States. We rely on the abundant seafood that comes from our unpolluted, well-stocked waters. This is being threatened as I write this. The oil rig explosion killed a number of hard workers and I believe 11 of the worker's bodies have not been found and the search has been terminated. Add this to the likely horredous toll this spill will take on our fishes, sea life and wildlife along the coast and my heart aches. I do understand this oil spill may make the Exxon Valdez look lame. WTF is happening to our gifts we have had bestowed upon us as we partake of the goodness of the beaches and our waters?
Many of my family have asked me why I abhor oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. I say to that: Come with me. Now. Look. Then ask me.

We have a tremendous lobby group in our area...Emerald Coast Waterkeepers...and they have repeatedly provided facts and figures as to the likelihood of this type of accident occuring. Perhaps, someone just might listen up as the voter's watch the elected official's voting record as well as who lines your deep pockets.

Please, BFP, just keep our area close to your hearts for a while. I am a volunteer for our Wildlife Sanctuary and we are pulling out every stop we can to prepare for what is at hand. Please pray that we have effective leadership and healing hands as we take a seagull, pelican, sandpiper and so on to clean and try to restore them to some degree of normalcy.
Thank you, BFP. You, of all groups, I know understand the depth of this mess and, perhaps, collectively we can all send energy to those in this massive clean up.

[Toughy]

Although I have not heard the most recent update on the oil spill in the northern region of the Gulf of Mexico I am acutely aware of what is about to happen to our coast line within a matter of days, perhaps hours. I reside in Pensacola, Florida. We have the whitest beaches and the most pristine sapphire waters in the southeast and likely in the entire United States. We rely on the abundant seafood that comes from our unpolluted, well-stocked waters. This is being threatened as I write this. The oil rig explosion killed a number of hard workers and I believe 11 of the worker's bodies have not been found and the search has been terminated. Add this to the likely horredous toll this spill will take on our fishes, sea life and wildlife along the coast and my heart aches. I do understand this oil spill may make the Exxon Valdez look lame. WTF is happening to our gifts we have had bestowed upon us as we partake of the goodness of the beaches and our waters?
Many of my family have asked me why I abhor oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. I say to that: Come with me. Now. Look. Then ask me.

We have a tremendous lobby group in our area...Emerald Coast Waterkeepers...and they have repeatedly provided facts and figures as to the likelihood of this type of accident occuring. Perhaps, someone just might listen up as the voter's watch the elected official's voting record as well as who lines your deep pockets.

Please, BFP, just keep our area close to your hearts for a while. I am a volunteer for our Wildlife Sanctuary and we are pulling out every stop we can to prepare for what is at hand. Please pray that we have effective leadership and healing hands as we take a seagull, pelican, sandpiper and so on to clean and try to restore them to some degree of normalcy.
Thank you, BFP. You, of all groups, I know understand the depth of this mess and, perhaps, collectively we can all send energy to those in this massive clean up.

where is my magnifying glass......cuz my reading glasses ain't do me much good.............laughin

[Rook]

:candle::puertorico::candle:

:seesaw:

WASHINGTON – The House on Thursday approved legislation that could set in motion changes in Puerto Rico's 112-year relationship with the United States, including a transition to statehood or independence. The House bill would give the 4 million residents of the island commonwealth a two-step path to expressing how they envision their political future. It passed 223-169 and now must be considered by the Senate.

Initially, eligible voters, including those born in Puerto Rico but residing in the United States, would vote on whether they wish to keep their current political status or opt for a different direction.

If a majority are in favor of changing the current situation, the Puerto Rican government would be authorized to conduct a second vote and people would choose among four options: statehood, independence, the current commonwealth status or sovereignty in association with the United States. Congress would have to vote on whether Puerto Rico becomes a state.

Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico's nonvoting delegate to the House, said that while the island has had votes on similar issues in the past, Congress has never authorized a process where Puerto Ricans state whether they should remain a U.S. territory or seek a nonterritorial status.

"The American way is to allow people to vote, to express themselves and to tell their elected officials how they feel about their political arrangements," said Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuno at a news conference with Pierluisi. "For 112 years, we haven't had the chance ... to fully participate in one way or another in the decisions that affect our daily lives."

Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory at the end of the Spanish-American War. Those born on the island were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917 and Puerto Rico gained commonwealth status in 1952.

Today, Puerto Ricans serve in the military but can't vote in presidential elections. They do not pay federal income tax on income earned on the island.

In the last referendum, "none of the above" garnered 50 percent of the vote, topping the other options, including statehood at 46.5 percent and independence at 2.5 percent.

Some of those differences were evident among lawmakers of Puerto Rican background. Puerto Rico-born Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., whose parents were from Puerto Rico, strongly opposed the measure, saying it was designed to push a statehood agenda. "This is the Puerto Rico 51st state bill," said Gutierrez, an independence proponent. "The deck is stacked."

But another Puerto Rico-born lawmaker, Democrat Jose Serrano of New York, backed it. "I support it because for the first time in 112 years the people of Puerto Rico will have an opportunity to express themselves."

Opposition to the House bill included Republican concerns about the consequences of Puerto Rico, where Spanish, as well as English, is the official language, becoming a state. Republicans said Puerto Rico would get some six seats in the House, possibly at the expense of other states, and that statehood would impose further burdens on the federal Treasury.

Republicans, led by Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., unsuccessfully tried to attach a provision that ballots favoring statehood make clear that a Puerto Rican state would adopt English as its official language and abide by Second Amendment gun rights. The proposal was defeated 198-194.

:candle::puertorico::candle:

[UofMfan]

New Okla. anti-abortion law temporarily blocked

By TIM TALLEY, Associated Press Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY – Oklahoma's attorney general agreed Monday to temporarily block enforcement of a controversial new state law that requires pregnant women to get an ultrasound and hear a detailed description of the fetus before they get an abortion.

The Center for Reproductive Rights was set to argue for a temporary restraining order Monday, but attorneys for both sides agreed to accept the order before the court hearing, Oklahoma County District Judge Noma Gurich said. She signed the order Monday afternoon.

"We're sorry to see implementation of the law delayed," said Tony Lauinger, state chairman of Oklahomans for Life and vice president of the National Right to Life Committee. "This has been a long process and apparently it will be a little longer."

A pregnant woman should have all of the information available before she makes the irrevocable decision to terminate her pregnancy, Lauinger said, adding: "We're confident that this law is constitutional."

Attorney General Drew Edmondson agreed to the order to give his office more time to retain Teresa Collett, a University of St. Thomas Law School professor who represented the state when a similar law passed in 2008 was challenged by the Center for Reproductive Rights. She also is the Republican nominee in Minnesota's 4th Congressional District election this fall.

A judge ruled last year that the 2008 law was unconstitutional because it violated requirements that legislative measures deal only with one subject — but did not rule on the validity of the ultrasound provisions.

The new abortion law went into effect last week after lawmakers overrode Gov. Brad Henry's veto.

The New York-based abortion rights group has said the new law is among the strictest in the nation. The law requires doctors to use a vaginal probe, which provides a clearer picture of the fetus than a regular ultrasound, and to describe the fetus in detail, including its dimensions, whether arms, legs and internal organs are visible and whether there is cardiac activity.

The law also requires doctors to turn a screen depicting the ultrasound images toward the woman so she can view them.

The Center for Reproductive Rights has said the law forces a woman to hear information that may not be relevant to her medical care and could interfere with the physician-patient relationship by compelling doctors to deliver unwanted speech.

Collett, a native of Norman, Okla., said Monday that nothing in Oklahoma's abortion statute is inconsistent with standard medical practice.

"It would be remarkable if a women would undergo a medical procedure and a doctor would not have an obligation to describe the procedure and the results of that procedure to the patient," Collett said.

She said state lawmakers required abortion providers to describe the ultrasound's images because of some doctors' "unusual failure" to pass along the information to pregnant women.

The Center for Reproductive Rights challenged the law on behalf of Nova Health Systems, operator of Reproductive Services of Tulsa, and Dr. Larry Burns, who the group said provides abortions in Norman.

Officials at Reproductive Services have said the law had drawn emotional responses from patients, some leaving in tears from the room where ultrasound procedures are performed because of what they had to hear.

[Toughy]

those idiot republican mother fuckers from OK don't have any concept of Christianity.......

This is utter bullshit.............

I want one of those men to under a procedure that requires a probe up their ass............

To force a women to have anything inserted in her vagina is RAPE............sorry ass fuckers..........all those who voted for this should be charged with rape the first time this happens to a woman...........

[Jet]

Didn't know where to post this:

Gay pastor reinstated in Atlanta

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/23449337/detail.html

[UofMfan]

Obama Nominates Kagan as Justice
By PETER BAKER and JEFF ZELENY
The New York Times.

Published: May 9, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the nation’s 112th justice, choosing his own chief advocate before the Supreme Court to join it in ruling on cases critical to his view of the country’s future, Democrats close to the White House said Sunday.

After a monthlong search, Mr. Obama informed Ms. Kagan and his advisers on Sunday of his choice to succeed the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. He plans to announce the nomination at 10 a.m. Monday in the East Room of the White House with Ms. Kagan by his side, said the Democrats, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the decision before it was formally made public.

In settling on Ms. Kagan, the president chose a well-regarded 50-year-old lawyer who served as a staff member in all three branches of government and was the first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School. If confirmed, she would be the youngest member and the third woman on the current court, but the first justice in nearly four decades without any prior judicial experience.

That lack of time on the bench may both help and hurt her confirmation prospects, allowing critics to question whether she is truly qualified while denying them a lengthy judicial paper trail filled with ammunition for attacks. As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan has represented the government before the Supreme Court for the past year, but her own views are to a large extent a matter of supposition.

Perhaps as a result, some on both sides of the ideological aisle are suspicious of her. Liberals dislike her support for strong executive power and her outreach to conservatives while running the law school. Activists on the right have attacked her for briefly barring military recruiters from a campus facility because the ban on openly gay men and lesbians serving in the military violated the school’s anti-discrimination policy.

Replacing Justice Stevens with Ms. Kagan presumably would not alter the broad ideological balance on the court, but her relative youth means that she could have an influence on the court for decades to come, underscoring the stakes involved.

In making his second nomination in as many years, Mr. Obama was not looking for a liberal firebrand as much as a persuasive leader who could attract the swing vote of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and counter what the president sees as the rightward direction of the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Particularly since the Citizens United decision invalidating on free speech grounds the restrictions on corporate spending in elections, Mr. Obama has publicly criticized the court, even during his State of the Union address with justices in the audience.

As he presses an ambitious agenda expanding the reach of government, Mr. Obama has come to worry that a conservative Supreme Court could become an obstacle down the road, aides said. It is conceivable that the Roberts court could eventually hear challenges to aspects of Mr. Obama’s health care program or to other policies like restrictions on carbon emissions and counterterrorism practices.

With all signs pointing to a Kagan nomination, critics have been pre-emptively attacking her in the days leading up to the president’s announcement. Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, writing on The Daily Beast, compared her to Harriet E. Miers, whose nomination by President George W. Bush collapsed amid an uprising among conservatives who considered her unqualified and not demonstrably committed to their judicial philosophy.

M. Edward Whelan III, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, wrote on National Review’s Web site that even Ms. Kagan’s nonjudicial experience was inadequate. “Kagan may well have less experience relevant to the work of being a justice than any entering justice in decades,” Mr. Whelan wrote.

Ms. Kagan defended her experience during confirmation hearings as solicitor general last year. “I bring up a lifetime of learning and study of the law, and particularly of the constitutional and administrative law issues that form the core of the court’s docket,” she testified. “I think I bring up some of the communications skills that has made me — I’m just going to say it — a famously excellent teacher.”

Ms. Kagan was one of Mr. Obama’s runners-up last year when he nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the court, and she was always considered the front-runner this year. The president also interviewed three other candidates, all federal appeals court judges: Merrick B. Garland of Washington, Diane P. Wood of Chicago and Sidney R. Thomas of Montana.

Ms. Kagan had several advantages from the beginning that made her the most obvious choice. For one, she works for Mr. Obama, who has been impressed with her intelligence and legal capacity, aides said, and she worked for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he was a senator. For another, she is the youngest of the four finalists, meaning she would most likely have the longest tenure as a justice.

Ms. Kagan was also confirmed by the Senate just last year, albeit with 31 no votes, making it harder for Republicans who voted for her in 2009 to vote against her in 2010.

The president can also say he reached beyond the so-called “judicial monastery,” although picking a solicitor general and former Harvard law dean hardly reaches outside the Ivy League, East Coast legal elite. And her confirmation would allow Mr. Obama to build on his appointment of Justice Sotomayor by bringing the number of women on the court to its highest ever (three, with Justice Sotomayor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg).

Moreover, in his selection of finalists, Mr. Obama effectively framed the choice so that he could seemingly take the middle road by picking Ms. Kagan, who correctly or not was viewed as ideologically between Judge Wood on the left and Judge Garland in the center.

Judge Garland was widely seen as the most likely alternative to Ms. Kagan and the one most likely to win easy confirmation. Well respected on both sides of the aisle, he had a number of conservatives publicly calling him the best they could hope for from a Democratic president. Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, privately made clear to the president that he considered Judge Garland a good choice, according to people briefed on their conversations.

But Mr. Obama ultimately opted to save Judge Garland for when he faces a more hostile Senate and needs a nominee with more Republican support. Democrats expect to lose seats in this fall’s election, so if another Supreme Court seat comes open next year and Mr. Obama has a substantially thinner margin in the Senate than he has today, Judge Garland would be an obvious choice.

As for Ms. Kagan, strategists on both sides anticipate a fight over her confirmation but not necessarily an all-out war. The White House hopes the Senate Judiciary Committee can hold hearings before July 4, but some Congressional aides were skeptical. Either way, Democrats want Ms. Kagan confirmed by the August recess so she can join the court for the start of its new term in October.

A New Yorker who grew up in Manhattan, Ms. Kagan earned degrees from Princeton, Oxford and Harvard Law School, worked briefly in private practice, clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, served as a Senate staff member and worked as a White House lawyer and domestic policy aide under President Bill Clinton. She was nominated for an appeals court judgeship in 1999, but the Senate never voted on her nomination.

She has been a trailblazer along the way, not only as the first woman to run Harvard Law School but also as the first woman to serve as solicitor general. Her inexperience as a judge makes her a rarity in modern times, but until the 1970s many Supreme Court justices came from outside the judiciary, including senators, governors, cabinet secretaries and even a former president.

If the Senate confirms Ms. Kagan, who is Jewish, the Supreme Court for the first time will have no Protestant members. In that case, the court would be composed of six justices who are Catholic and three who are Jewish. It also would mean that every member of the court had studied law at Harvard or Yale.

Like her former boss, Justice Marshall, who was the last solicitor general to go directly to the Supreme Court, Ms. Kagan may be forced to recuse herself during her early time on the bench because of her participation in a number of cases coming before the justices. Tom Goldstein, publisher of ScotusBlog, a Web site that follows the court, estimated that she would have to sit out on 13 to 15 matters. Mr. Whelan argued that it would be significantly more than that.

[Jet]

Although I have not heard the most recent update on the oil spill in the northern region of the Gulf of Mexico I am acutely aware of what is about to happen to our coast line within a matter of days, perhaps hours. I reside in Pensacola, Florida. We have the whitest beaches and the most pristine sapphire waters in the southeast and likely in the entire United States. We rely on the abundant seafood that comes from our unpolluted, well-stocked waters. This is being threatened as I write this. The oil rig explosion killed a number of hard workers and I believe 11 of the worker's bodies have not been found and the search has been terminated. Add this to the likely horredous toll this spill will take on our fishes, sea life and wildlife along the coast and my heart aches. I do understand this oil spill may make the Exxon Valdez look lame. WTF is happening to our gifts we have had bestowed upon us as we partake of the goodness of the beaches and our waters?
Many of my family have asked me why I abhor oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. I say to that: Come with me. Now. Look. Then ask me.

We have a tremendous lobby group in our area...Emerald Coast Waterkeepers...and they have repeatedly provided facts and figures as to the likelihood of this type of accident occuring. Perhaps, someone just might listen up as the voter's watch the elected official's voting record as well as who lines your deep pockets.

Please, BFP, just keep our area close to your hearts for a while. I am a volunteer for our Wildlife Sanctuary and we are pulling out every stop we can to prepare for what is at hand. Please pray that we have effective leadership and healing hands as we take a seagull, pelican, sandpiper and so on to clean and try to restore them to some degree of normalcy.
Thank you, BFP. You, of all groups, I know understand the depth of this mess and, perhaps, collectively we can all send energy to those in this massive clean up.




I share your concerns and grief.
Here is the latest video:

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=19861770

[Rook]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A moderate earthquake struck Puerto Rico early Sunday, damaging some houses in western and northern towns and causing a rock slide on a highway. No one was reported injured.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the magnitude-5.8 earthquake struck at 1:16 a.m. (0516 GMT) Sunday about four miles (six kilometers) from the small community of Espino on the western side of the Caribbean island and 63 miles (101 kilometers) from the capital, San Juan, where it was felt by high-rise dwellers.

It was recorded at a depth of 67 miles (113 kilometers), according to the USGS.

The quake cracked the concrete foundations of a few buildings in the towns of Florida, Lares, Moca, Utuado and Vega Baja, according to Puerto Rico's emergency management agency.

Agency spokeswoman Melina Simeonides said the quake also spilled rocks over a highway in Utuado, where it also shifted a concrete house some four inches from its foundation.

Engineers were trying determine if other damaged homes were safe.

Local authorities on Sunday were monitoring coastal areas close to the epicenter and evaluating the damage.

I think these "small" Quakes are a warning of things to come {bigger Earthquakes in PR , ex.}
:help:

[Nat]

For anybody following Bret Michaels' health - he had a mini-stroke and had to be re-admitted to the hospital and it turns out he has a hole in his heart.

link (http://omg.yahoo.com/news/bret-michaels-suffers-a-stroke/41157?nc)

[Mr. Moon]

Just heard that the oil is reaching the gulflands.

The marshes will be destroyed (when they wanted a permit to dig some sort of dredge to stop it and it's taken too long)

They said within 5 days the marshland will die and will not return. Animals included. This is huge and disgraceful. Louisiana has been through so much. This will take away their livelihoods.

Brings tears to my eyes with frustration. Recovery has not be a real science that's been researched enough.

Awful.

(this makes me so mad, the well itself had problems they ignored to make their money. These people in charge....couldn't they see how they were going to affect SO MANY THINGS?)

UGH!

[SuperFemme]

Here are the disturbing news stories showing up as "breaking news" right now on my front page. Good GOD!



Man who flees from police found underneath stuffed animals (http://www.kfoxtv.com/news/23633922/detail.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss)
Shocking text messages released in brutal beating of girl (http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/crime/the-text-message-that-provoked-wayne-treacy-go-700687.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss)
Man trying to catch bus falls down manhole; calls 911 from cell phone (http://www.wpxi.com/news/23631417/detail.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss)
Student punches school bus driver in the face (http://www.ajc.com/news/north-fulton/student-punches-school-bus-532559.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss)
Parents accused of making daughter eat, sleep, use bathroom outside for eight years (http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/parents-accused-of-making-daughter-eat-sleep-use-701441.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss)
Lance Armstrong's team releases Landis emails (http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/tdf/entries/2010/05/21/team_radioshack_to_release_lan.html?cxntlid=cmg_cn tnt_rss)
1794 silver dollar sells for record $7.85M (http://www.ktvu.com/money/23626648/detail.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss)
Fla. prison escapee caught in wooded area near Orlando (http://www.wftv.com/news/23633219/detail.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss)
Finding cause of massive scrapyard fire could take weeks (http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/dayton-news/finding-cause-of-scrapyard-fire-could-take-weeks-719966.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss)
Jersey Shore cast in Miami Beach can't wait to head north (http://www.page2live.com/2010/05/21/jersey-shore-theyre-sick-of-south-florida/?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss)

[UofMfan]

White House Seeks To Speed Up 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Repeal

PHILIP ELLIOTT | 05/24/10 09:30 PM | AP

WASHINGTON — A proposal to step up the repeal of the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military but still allow the Pentagon time – perhaps even years – to implement new policies won the White House's backing on Monday after administration officials met with gay rights activists.

The White House budget office sent a letter supporting the proposal to remove the Clinton-era "don't ask, don't tell" law even as the Pentagon continues a review of the system. Implementation of policy for gays serving openly would still require the approval of President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen. How long implementation might take is not known, but the proposed amendment would have no effect on current practices.

"The proposed amendment will allow for completion of the comprehensive review, enable the Department of Defense to assess the results of the review, and ensure that the implementation of the of the repeal is consistent with standards of military readiness, effectiveness, unit cohesion, recruiting and retention," budget chief Peter Orszag wrote in identical evening letters to Pennsylvania Rep. Patrick Murphy, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and Michigan Sen. Carl Levin – the Democrats leading the push for repeal

Murphy, an Iraq war veteran, was expected to introduce the legislative proposal on Tuesday. Gay rights groups urged a quick vote, which could come as early as Thursday.

"Without a repeal vote by Congress this year, the Pentagon's hands are tied and the armed forces will be forced to continue adhering to the discriminatory 'don't ask, don't tell' law," said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign.

The White House had hoped lawmakers would delay action until Pentagon officials had completed their study so fellow Democrats would not face criticism that they moved too quickly or too far ahead of public opinion in this election year. Instead, administration officials recognized it could not stop Congress in its effort to repeal the 1993 ban and joined the negotiations.

Hours after activists met at the White House, top Democratic lawmakers met on Capitol Hill and approved the final version of a brokered deal that adds the repeal to the annual defense spending bill.

Obama called for the repeal during his State of the Union address this year, and Gates and Mullen have echoed his views but have cautioned any action must be paced.

In a speech last year at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., Gates noted that the 1948 executive order for racial integration took five years to implement.

[Kobi]

Anyone else wondering why the oil spilling into the gulf is being so under-reported i.e. media not using the visual tactics of oilsoaked wildlife, media not showing the outrage of helpless coastal residents over and over again? It is incredibly subdued reporting.

Feds tied up the tv for a while yesterday explaining why they werent getting involved....odd dont you think? It's our coastline that is being irreparably harmed and yet the feds arent involved?

Maybe the feds are too busy planning their next bailout...of BP for the clean up costs.....of our coastline.

And they want to know why I am opposed to a wind farm on the ocean floor off the Mass coast? Hello?

[Toughy]

I'm confused about you being opposed to wind farms in the Atlantic coastal waters. Why are you opposed? IF one of them breaks and falls down, there is no oil spilled, there is no environmental impact to the fisheries.

The one drawback I can see to windmills is the pretty view from billion dollar homes might not be so pretty...........

[Kobi]

I'm confused about you being opposed to wind farms in the Atlantic coastal waters. Why are you opposed? IF one of them breaks and falls down, there is no oil spilled, there is no environmental impact to the fisheries.

The one drawback I can see to windmills is the pretty view from billion dollar homes might not be so pretty...........

If it was only the views....life would be so much simpler.

In a nut shell, I believe the oceans were created in specific ways to do specific things, for specific reasons.

I dont think mankind has the right to exploit natural resources for financial gain especially when the risks of doing so are not known in their entirety. Governmental reviews and such are not, to me, anything to be trusted when a financial gain is a stake.

Simple physics shows that you cannot submerge tons of concrete bases without changing the dispersion of water. Hence you simply hasten erosion of the coastline. Think of a glass of water half full, then add ice...what happens?

Current wind technology is best for 20-30 mile winds, and designed to shut down when the wind is higher in order to protect the equipment. You dont need to stick 250 foot towers in the ocean floor to harness 20-30 mile winds.

I am not convinced that these towers will not affect marine life. Much like builders like to say knocking down forests to build homes doesnt disturb the wildlife who lives in them....we know thats bull hockey.

So, its not about views and it ticked me off a bit to hear that being said.

[Toughy]

I didn't mean to tick you off.......that's just the reason I had been hearing..........nobody could ever tell me anything else.

Some of what you say makes sense to me. Let me get to the part that doesn't make sense.

It sounds like you don't believe in green energy sources such as wind and solar and ocean waves. Those are all natural resources.

I do agree wind turbines in the ocean probably is a stupid idea. There are plenty of places on the land to put them. We've had them in No Cal for years without environmental issues that I know of....yes there is some stuff about birds getting killed and nesting in the housing units. There are ways to deal with the nesting problems and the number of birds killed is really truly insignificant in the big picture.

Solar technology is getting better and better every year.

I think the real problem with green energy production is with fossil fuel energy corporations. They don't want office buildings and housing to produce even a small part of the energy they use. They poo poo solar and wind and promote 'clean coal' and 'natural gas'....<snort>

I don't understand why New Orleans is not being rebuilt as a green city. You could put solar panels on every building in the city and reduce the amount of non-green energy that is consumed. Same for all new buildings everywhere in the country.

I dunno........just some thoughts rolling around in my head.......no judgment at all.....

[Kobi]

Toughy,

I hear the view argument a lot....lol.

I would love to see us switch to green energy resources. And I dont believe I said I was against solar, wind or ocean wave energy. Heck if they could harness all the hot air coming out of the nations capital, we wouldnt need to worry about energy costs at all. :)

I do advocate going green in ways that make sense. We dont have to land on or take over the sun to use solar energy. We dont need to involve the ocean to harness wind.

If we were serious about going green, we would demand the technology be geared toward individual residences or businesses. If we can shrink satellite dishes, we can work to shrink the rest of the technology so it is affordable and easy to install for all homeowners.

I really dislike when profit overrides common sense.

[MsDemeanor]

I dont think mankind has the right to exploit natural resources for financial gain especially when the risks of doing so are not known in their entirety.
That's only possible if one is living in some remote shack and growing one's own food and clothing and never doing so much as bartering for supplies with anyone else. It pretty much rules out everything that most of us encounter in our lives, from electricity, oil, and gas to the basics of food, clothing, and shelter. If it comes out of the ground or lives off the earth, someone somewhere is using it for financial gain, and I'd guess that a fair portion of it is being done without risks being known in their entirety.

[Andrew, Jr.]

Is there any news on the cement and sand being pushed into the BP pipeline? I haven't heard anything on the news yet.

[Toughy]

I believe they are doing it tomorrow (wed)

[Jet]

Oil Disaster Update on "Top Kill" procedure
How does BP's 'top kill' work? (Updated)

BP has decided to proceed with what's called a "top kill" to try to stop oil from gushing into the Gulf of Mexico..more...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100526/sc_ynews/ynews_sc2252

[Jet]

Public opinion turning against Obama on oil spill

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_pl2270

[Jet]

Gulf oil spill now bigger than Exxon Valdez

Associated Press
COVINGTON, La. – The Gulf oil spill has surpassed the Exxon Valdez as the worst in U.S. history, according to new estimates released Thursday, but the Coast Guard and BP said an untested procedure to stop it seemed to be working.

More including video....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gulf_oil_spill

[Jet]

House approves repeal of gay ban in military

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100528/ap_on_go_co/us_gays_military

[Toughy]

It also passed the Senate. The House and Senate versions need to be reconciled and it will off to the President to sign.

Come December, the Pentagon will have the plan ready and it may just be that our xmas present this year will be one more step to full equal rights.

[Shadowboi2010]

Gulf oil spill now bigger than Exxon Valdez

Associated Press
COVINGTON, La. – The Gulf oil spill has surpassed the Exxon Valdez as the worst in U.S. history, according to new estimates released Thursday, but the Coast Guard and BP said an untested procedure to stop it seemed to be working.

More including video....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gulf_oil_spill

I've been watching the top kill go on over the oil jet and what I "think" is happening is that now the oil still leaking, but its picking up particulate as it spills. They said they aren't done yet and that it will still be a couple of days till its complete. The fossil industry never anticipated that this could ever happen, that it would break at the base, or "shear."

I fully believe that if oil and coal were regulated, and design considerations were given like the nuclear industry, with its redundant and passive safety systems, this would not have happened.

Fortunately there is a new round of advanced nuclear reactors that will run even safer than they have for the past 30 years. The world has taken off without us in this particular technology where we used to lead the world. I personally believe we will never run out of oil, it will just get too expensive to get. Heck, even oil shale that was so incredibly not lucrative is being considered once again.

Solar and wind, just do not generate the kind of electricity to support the base load that is going to be required for the future because the need is going to increase, and these windmills and panels take up huge tracts of land and are not feasible for all areas of the country. Even battery technology is not where we need it to be...they are not power generators, they are a power reserves that are depleted. The materials in a lithium ion battery come from hostile countries (Russia, Columbia, etc) not to mention one rare earth metal.

We've only had one issue in the entire history of our nuclear past and even still, the safety measures WORKED. There was no breech in containment, no radiation was spilled, and no one died. In the last few months, 39 people have died from oil and coal compared to nuclear's "zero" in the past 30 years. My own great grandfather was killed in a coal mining accident working overtime to be sure his kids had a nice Christmas, only to leave them fatherless for it. As far as Chernobyl...thats comparing apples and oranges and doesn't even compare to a single reactor we have here in the US. The plant was built without regard for safety, and it was run without regard to procedure. It doesn't even have a containment building.

We need to get the Westinghouse AP-1000, the Kandu, and the ABWR's working for us. They are clean, safe, no carbon emissions, and if we get the law reversed that was set in place by the Carter administration we can reprocess spent fuel and use it again. Heck we are doing it for our military's nuclear subs, but we can't do it for a rector? Doesn't make sense! 93% of the fuel that is in dry storage can be recovered. Even better, Breeder Reactor Technology uses the spent fuel and keeps reprocessing itself. We have the technology to do it.

I've grown up with a father who has been in the nuclear industry for over 40 years and I have grown up with a love for the industry and a willingness for push it forward. In my opinion in the nuclear industry the word "Safety" and the word "quality" should always be interchangeable.

[Rook]

Sounds very similar to what Penn & Teller discussed in their bullsh*t episode 9, season 5 involving Hybrids, Nuclear Energy and Lesbians on a blind date {the lesbian part was amusing, almost funny..but then, most of their episodes give facts with a serious dose of humor/cynicism}

:hamactor:

[Rook]

BP says Gulf oil leak is 'environmental catastrophe'

BP's top official, who had previously said the environmental impact on Gulf of Mexico would be modest, upgraded his assessment Friday to an "environmental catastrophe."

Also Friday, engineers in the Gulf tried the "junk shot" method in an attempt to stop a massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, BP's chief executive Tony Hayward said.

The procedure involved shooting debris such as shredded rubber tires, golf balls and similar objects into the blowout preventer in an attempt to clog it and stop the leak. The goal of the junk shot is to force-feed the preventer, the device that failed when the disaster unfolded, until it becomes so plugged that the oil stops flowing or slows to a relative trickle.

The company plans to resume its "top kill" method, pumping heavy mud into the leak, later Friday, he said.

President Obama is scheduled to visit Louisiana on Friday for the second time since an oil rig explosion sent a historic amount of oil gushing into the Gulf.

Obama's visit comes as his administration has been criticized for its response to the massive underwater gusher that is now estimated to be twice the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

"I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down," Obama said Thursday at a White House news conference. "That doesn't mean it's going to be easy. That doesn't mean it's going to happen right away or the way I'd like it to happen. That doesn't mean we aren't going to make mistakes."

The president even said his 11-year-old daughter, Malia, weighed in on the issue on Thursday.

"You know, when I woke up this morning and I'm shaving, and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, 'Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?'" he said.

BP attempted to cap the spill using the "top kill" method Thursday.

The "top kill" involves pumping heavy drilling fluid into the head of the leaking well at the sea floor. The manufactured fluid, known as drilling mud, is normally used as a lubricant and counterweight in drilling operations. Officials hope the drilling mud will stop the flow of oil. Cement then would be pumped in to seal the well.

"This whole operation is very, very dynamic," said Doug Suttles, the company's chief operating officer "When we did the initial pumping [Wednesday], we clearly impacted the flow of the well. We then stopped to monitor the well. Based on that we restarted again. We didn't think we were making enough progress after we restarted, so we stopped again."

The light-brown material that was seen spilling out of the well throughout Thursday was the previously pumped fluid from the top kill procedure mixed with oil, he said.

"I probably should apologize to folks that we haven't been giving more data on that," Suttles said when asked why it took so long for BP to announce it had suspended the top kill. "It was nothing more than we are so focused on the operation itself."

Suttles said part of the problem is that too much of the muddy fluid is leaving the breach instead of going down the well.

"So what we need to do is adjust how we are doing the job so that we get more of the drilling mud to go down the well," Suttles said.

He said one solution would be to introduce solids -- known as "bridging material" or its variant "junk shot" -- into the mix.

The revelation that BP suspended the "top kill" effort for 16 hours before it was restarted late Thursday afternoon troubled some.

Neither Obama nor Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is leading the government's response to the oil spill, appeared to be aware of the break when they addressed reporters at separate news conferences Thursday.

A White House official told CNN that people inside the White House knew about the temporary halt in the "top kill," but it wasn't clear if Obama was aware of it.

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, who has been critical of the federal response to the spill, said the delay in information from BP was "par for the course."

"We've been dealing with this from day one, and the information has not flowed on anything," he said.

Stopping the leak took on even more urgency after government scientists released spill estimates that far exceed the previous 5,000-barrel-a-day number given by BP.

The burst well is spewing oil at a rate of at least 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt told reporters Thursday, meaning 260,000 to 540,000 barrels had leaked as of 10 days ago -- larger than the 250,000 barrels spilled when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.

The spill erupted April 20, when the drilling platform Deepwater Horizon exploded and burned about 40 miles off Louisiana. The rig sank two days later, taking 11 of its crew of 125 with it.

The rush of oil has taken its toll on Louisiana's sensitive coastal marshes. Heavy oil has been killing plant life and fouling local wildlife and fisheries. On Thursday, the eve of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the beaches of Grand Isle were empty.

"If only it gets stopped, if what they did yesterday works, that's the beginning of the end," Grand Isle Tourism Commissioner Josie Cheramie said. "We can clean up what's already been put out there, but we just really need to get it stopped. That's the main thing."

:seeingstars: :tea: :blink:

[Jet]

Arresting images of oil spill help drive story
Debacle of Debacles

Includes latest video from ABC

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100528/ap_on_en_tv/us_oil_spill_video

[Fancy]

Here's a personal interest story from NPR...For everything there is balance.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89164759

March 28, 2008
Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"

Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.

"You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help," Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

"The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi," Diaz says. "The kid was like, 'You know everybody here. Do you own this place?'"

"No, I just eat here a lot," Diaz says he told the teen. "He says, 'But you're even nice to the dishwasher.'"

Diaz replied, "Well, haven't you been taught you should be nice to everybody?"

"Yea, but I didn't think people actually behaved that way," the teen said.

Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. "He just had almost a sad face," Diaz says.

The teen couldn't answer Diaz — or he didn't want to.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, "Look, I guess you're going to have to pay for this bill 'cause you have my money and I can't pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I'll gladly treat you."

The teen "didn't even think about it" and returned the wallet, Diaz says. "I gave him $20 ... I figure maybe it'll help him. I don't know."

Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen's knife — "and he gave it to me."

Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, "You're the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch."

"I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world."

Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo.

[Andrew, Jr.]

Gary Coleman died today. He fell from having a seizure, and hit his head. He had an intercranial bleed and was on life support until he died.

[Ms. Tabitha]

Gary Coleman died today. He fell from having a seizure, and hit his head. He had an intercranial bleed and was on life support until he died.



He will be in peace now. He has had a lot of health issues recently, not to mention turmoil in his personal life.

http://www.etonline.com/news/2010/05/87762/index.html (http://www.etonline.com/news/2010/05/87762/index.html)

(w)

[Toughy]

It also passed the Senate. The House and Senate versions need to be reconciled and it will off to the President to sign.

Come December, the Pentagon will have the plan ready and it may just be that our xmas present this year will be one more step to full equal rights.

I mis-spoke. The Senate has not passed the Defense Authorization Bill with the amendment to allow the repeal of DADT. That should happen within a couple of weeks.

DADT is still in effect and folks can and will continue to be discharged under it.

I'm still hoping for a xmas present.

[UofMfan]

Dennis Hopper DEAD: Died Aged 74

First Posted: 05-29-10 01:37 PM | Updated: 05-29-10 01:37 PM HuffPo

Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper has died after a long bout with prostate cancer, according to reports. He was 74.

[Martina]

Dennis Hopper DEAD: Died Aged 74

First Posted: 05-29-10 01:37 PM | Updated: 05-29-10 01:37 PM HuffPo

Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper has died after a long bout with prostate cancer, according to reports. He was 74.

Oh my. That makes me sad.

[UofMfan]

Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements.

http://www.truthout.org/why-misogynists-make-great-informants59966

[Linus]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/31/honduras.storm.emergency/index.html?hpt=T1

The crater is unbelievable. You can see this youtube (if someone can translate some of it, that'd be great!): YouTube- Tormenta Agatha Guatemala Crater en San Cristobal, Mixco

[UofMfan]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/31/honduras.storm.emergency/index.html?hpt=T1

The crater is unbelievable. You can see this youtube (if someone can translate some of it, that'd be great!): YouTube- Tormenta Agatha Guatemala Crater en San Cristobal, Mixco (http://youtube.com/watch?v=RN3_dnClvAM)

Ok here is a very quick translation:

There was a well where the crater is now, with the rains the well collapsed and made this 3 meters wide by 3 meters high, by13 meters long, crater. 5 buildings in the vicinity are in danger, including a church. 240 sq meters of land were lost. Neighbors reported tremors the night before and that was when the the earth was crumbling. Authorities have asked those that live nearby to evacuate since they are in danger.

[Linus]

Ok here is a very quick translation:

There was a well where the crater is now, with the rains the well collapsed and made this 3 meters wide by 3 meters high, by13 meters long, crater. 5 buildings in the vicinity are in danger, including a church. 240 sq meters of land were lost. Neighbors reported tremors the night before and that was when the the earth was crumbling. Authorities have asked those that live nearby to evacuate since they are in danger.

That would explain the near perfectness of the crater I guess. Very cool. Still.. it's :|

[UofMfan]

Supreme Court Miranda Ruling: Suspects Must Explicitly Tell Police They Want To Remain Silent

JESSE J. HOLLAND | 06/ 1/10 10:59 AM | AP

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, a decision one dissenting justice said turns defendants' rights "upside down."

A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But the justices said in a 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.

The ruling comes in a case where a suspect, Van Chester Thompkins, remained mostly silent for a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a Jan. 10, 2000, murder in Southfield, Mich. He appealed his conviction, saying that he invoked his Miranda right to remain silent by remaining silent.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the court's conservatives, said that wasn't enough.

"Thompkins did not say that he wanted to remain silent or that he did not want to talk to police," Kennedy said. "Had he made either of these simple, unambiguous statements, he would have invoked his 'right to cut off questioning.' Here he did neither, so he did not invoke his right to remain silent."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's newest member, wrote a strongly worded dissent for the court's liberals, saying the majority's decision "turns Miranda upside down."

"Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent – which counterintuitively, requires them to speak," she said. "At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded."

Van Chester Thompkins was arrested for murder in 2001 and interrogated by police for three hours. At the beginning, Thompkins was read his Miranda rights and said he understood.

The officers in the room said Thompkins said little during the interrogation, occasionally answering "yes," "no," "I don't know," nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for "shooting that boy down," Thompkins said, "Yes."

He was convicted, but on appeal he wanted that statement thrown out because he said he invoked his Miranda rights by being uncommunicative with the interrogating officers.

The Cincinnati-based appeals court agreed and threw out his confession and conviction. The high court reversed that decision.

The case is Berghuis v. Thompkins, 08-1470.

[Medusa]

Supreme Court Miranda Ruling: Suspects Must Explicitly Tell Police They Want To Remain Silent

JESSE J. HOLLAND | 06/ 1/10 10:59 AM | AP

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, a decision one dissenting justice said turns defendants' rights "upside down."

A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But the justices said in a 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.

The ruling comes in a case where a suspect, Van Chester Thompkins, remained mostly silent for a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a Jan. 10, 2000, murder in Southfield, Mich. He appealed his conviction, saying that he invoked his Miranda right to remain silent by remaining silent.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the court's conservatives, said that wasn't enough.

"Thompkins did not say that he wanted to remain silent or that he did not want to talk to police," Kennedy said. "Had he made either of these simple, unambiguous statements, he would have invoked his 'right to cut off questioning.' Here he did neither, so he did not invoke his right to remain silent."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's newest member, wrote a strongly worded dissent for the court's liberals, saying the majority's decision "turns Miranda upside down."

"Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent – which counterintuitively, requires them to speak," she said. "At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded."

Van Chester Thompkins was arrested for murder in 2001 and interrogated by police for three hours. At the beginning, Thompkins was read his Miranda rights and said he understood.

The officers in the room said Thompkins said little during the interrogation, occasionally answering "yes," "no," "I don't know," nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for "shooting that boy down," Thompkins said, "Yes."

He was convicted, but on appeal he wanted that statement thrown out because he said he invoked his Miranda rights by being uncommunicative with the interrogating officers.

The Cincinnati-based appeals court agreed and threw out his confession and conviction. The high court reversed that decision.

The case is Berghuis v. Thompkins, 08-1470.



Oh GAAAHHHHHH. I think this is terrible!!

Makes me wonder how they intend to handle people who are intoxicated or mentally ill or who lack socially conformed communication skills.

[UofMfan]

Oh GAAAHHHHHH. I think this is terrible!!

Makes me wonder how they intend to handle people who are intoxicated or mentally ill or who lack socially conformed communication skills.

Yes, those people that the US used to look out for, before it became this Conservative Police State.

Just another terrible decision to add to the list of many recent ones.

[UofMfan]

Joran Van Der Sloot Confession: Natalee Holloway Murder Suspect Confesses To Killing Stephany Flores In Peru

AP/Huffington Post | FRANKLIN BRICENO

A Joran van der Sloot confession may close one murder case while raising more questions in another.

The Dutchman, long the prime suspect in U.S. teen Natalee Holloway's 2005 disappearance in Aruba, confessed to killing a different young woman in his Lima hotel room last week, a police spokesman says.

Police Col. Abel Gamarra, head of the Information Directorate of Police, told The Associated Press late Monday that Van der Sloot admitted under questioning by police that he killed 21-year-old Stephany Flores.

Gamarra said the case will be turned over to prosecutors who will present formal charges against Van der Sloot. The National Prison Institute will determine which prison he will be held in while awaiting trial.

Police planned to take Van der Sloot to the hotel on Tuesday to participate in a reconstruction of the events leading to Flores' slaying, Gamarra said.

Gamarra did not provide further details about the confession.

NBC reports a chilling account of the van der Sloot confession from a local paper:

According to La Republica newspaper, van der Sloot said he broke Stephany Flores' neck after she grabbed his laptop without his permission and found out that he was involved in the disappearance of an American woman.
Story continues below

The paper quoted van der Sloot as saying, "I did not want to do it. The girl intruded into my private life... she didn't have any right.

"I went to her and I hit her. She was scared, we argued and she tried to escape. I grabbed her by the neck and hit her."

A Peruvian television station, Channel 4, also said it had obtained details about Van der Sloot's confession in which he reportedly told police that he killed Flores because he got angry when he found out that she had looked up information about his past on his laptop.

Flores, a university student studying business administration, was found beaten to death in the hotel room where the Dutchman had stayed while participating in a poker tournament. Flores is thought to have met Van der Sloot at the casino.

She was last seen alive on a hotel video the night of May 30 entering Van der Sloot's room. The Dutchman is seen on the video leaving the room several hours later with his baggage and walking out of the hotel.

Police said he took a bus to Chile, where he was captured several days later and returned to Peru.

Van der Sloot has long been considered the main suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teenager Holloway on the Caribbean resort island of Aruba. He was arrested twice, but freed both times for lack of evidence.

[Gemme]

Stephany Flores' father made a statement saying that his daughter is an instrument in the quest for the justice of Natalee Holloway (paraphrasing). I think that it he's right, but that it sucks that the police couldn't have made the charges stick to him the first two times he was in police custody. I honestly hope the boy gets some homegrown justice in jail/prison. The Holloways have yet to learn exactly where/how their daughter died. That kind of not-knowing would drive me mad.

[UofMfan]

Stephany Flores' father made a statement saying that his daughter is an instrument in the quest for the justice of Natalee Holloway (paraphrasing). I think that it he's right, but that it sucks that the police couldn't have made the charges stick to him the first two times he was in police custody. I honestly hope the boy gets some homegrown justice in jail/prison. The Holloways have yet to learn exactly where/how their daughter died. That kind of not-knowing would drive me mad.

I think Stephanie Flower's father is right on the money.

I also believe that the Peruvian justice system will work in a way that he may be "forced" to finally confess about Natalee Holloway and hopefully that will give her parents some sort of peace.

I am guessing that if he has to do jail time in Peru then Karma is indeed at play here.

Not that I am an expert in Peru, but I know enough to know that I would not want to do jail time there.

Now, hopefully the Netherlands will not step in and ask for his extradition or pull some shit like that, they have been known to do that with some of their Nationals here in___________________________ fill in the blank :)

[Jet]

GM recalling 1.5M vehicles over fire concerns

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gm_recall

[AtLast]

I think Stephanie Flower's father is right on the money.

I also believe that the Peruvian justice system will work in a way that he may be "forced" to finally confess about Natalee Holloway and hopefully that will give her parents some sort of peace.

I am guessing that if he has to do jail time in Peru then Karma is indeed at play here.

Not that I am an expert in Peru, but I know enough to know that I would not want to do jail time there.

Now, hopefully the Netherlands will not step in and ask for his extradition or pull some shit like that, they have been known to do that with some of their Nationals here in___________________________ fill in the blank :)


Oh yeah! prison in Peru will be quite an experience! To be honest, he may not make it through his sentence. It will not be like Aruba!

If anything concerning Natalee Holloway comes out of this, I hope it is not only his confessing to killing her too, but telling her family where her remains are. They deserve something to bring her home. And this situation with him trying to get $ from her relatives for info about where her body is makes me think there is hope still for recovery of her remains. I have always thought Jouran's father disposed of her body and that it is on their property in Aruba. The elder Van Der Sloot died about a year ago. He creeped me out almost more than the kid, actually. Something sinister there with the two of them. And I still think the 2 Kalpo (sp?) brothers were involved in some way.

This guy has got to be put away!

[UofMfan]

I agree, I think the two other guys are most likely involved.

I do hope the Halloways get some closure. Finding the body wold go along way toward that. I can't believe the scum bag is trying to make money like this, gross!

This is a perfect example of old family money gone wrong. I also agree about the his dad, he creeped me out.

Let's see how he fares in Peru, but like you said, this is not Aruba where his family had some govt. officials in their pocket.



Oh yeah! prison in Peru will be quite an experience! To be honest, he may not make it through his sentence. It will not be like Aruba!

If anything concerning Natalee Holloway comes out of this, I hope it is not only his confessing to killing her too, but telling her family where her remains are. They deserve something to bring her home. And this situation with him trying to get $ from her relatives for info about where her body is makes me think there is hope still for recovery of her remains. I have always thought Jouran's father disposed of her body and that it is on their property in Aruba. The elder Van Der Sloot died about a year ago. He creeped me out almost more than the kid, actually. Something sinister there with the two of them. And I still think the 2 Kalpo (sp?) brothers were involved in some way.

This guy has got to be put away!

[Kätzchen]

Ok here is a very quick translation:

There was a well where the crater is now, with the rains the well collapsed and made this 3 meters wide by 3 meters high, by13 meters long, crater. 5 buildings in the vicinity are in danger, including a church. 240 sq meters of land were lost. Neighbors reported tremors the night before and that was when the the earth was crumbling. Authorities have asked those that live nearby to evacuate since they are in danger.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/05/31/honduras.storm.emergency/index.html?hpt=T1

The crater is unbelievable. You can see this youtube (if someone can translate some of it, that'd be great!): YouTube- Tormenta Agatha Guatemala Crater en San Cristobal, Mixco (http://youtube.com/watch?v=RN3_dnClvAM)

Thanks Linus for posting this video and thanks for the translation UofMfan!

This reminds me of Maude Barlow's speech on the water crisis: Barlow (a Canadian activist, are you familiar with her Linus?) spoke about a process called - dessertification - the displacement of water from land and thus, leading to heightened "dry states" (not a drought, its worse) wherein water is robbed from land to produce material goods or even ideas centering upon sprawling urban land use (concrete social scapes). In addition, when water is displaced like this, it causes underground water systems to cave in because the eco-system has been disrupted (i.e., the video that Linus found). Barlow was saying that by the year 2030, demand for water will outstrip supply by 40% (+/-) making the water the biggest symbol of inequality.

If anyone is interested in learning further about the looming water crisis, I embedded several videos of her speech in the news/poltical forums. Thanks for posting the video Linus (props to UofMfan too)!!!:candle::candle::candle:

[Toughy]

looming water crisis

Which is why big corporations are doing their best to privatize water all across the globe. You think the price of gasoline is high..........snort..........just wait til you see what is going to happen to your water bill.....

[UofMfan]

Which is why big corporations are doing their best to privatize water all across the globe. You think the price of gasoline is high..........snort..........just wait til you see what is going to happen to your water bill.....

Bingo!

Water here is becoming increasingly privatized. Scary times ahead.

[UofMfan]

See, in Peru they don't have the father's "influence" they had in Aruba. So now the PR campaign begins from the Dutch.


Joran Van Der Sloot To Be Taken To Crime Scene, Peru Officials Say
FRANKLIN BRICENO | 06/ 8/10 10:20 PM | AP

LIMA, Peru — Peruvian police plan to take Joran van der Sloot, who they say has confessed to last week's killing of a 21-year-old business student in his Lima hotel room, to visit the crime scene, officials said Tuesday.

They also said police have until the weekend to file criminal charges against the Dutchman in the May 30 killing of Stephany Flores.

The beating death occurred exactly five years after U.S. teenager Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba – an assumed death in which Van der Sloot has long been considered the prime suspect by authorities on the Dutch Caribbean island.

It wasn't clear if Van der Sloot has obtained private counsel, and there was no immediate word from either him or his family about the reported confession.

Peru's chief police spokesman, Col. Abel Gamarra, told The Associated Press late Monday that Van der Sloot confessed earlier in the day.

Several Peruvian media outlets reported, without identifying their sources, that he admitted to killing Flores in a rage after learning she looked up information about his past on his laptop without permission.

The newspaper La Republica said Van der Sloot tearfully confessed, in the presence of a prosecutor and a state-appointed attorney, to grabbing Flores by the neck and hitting her because she had viewed images about the Aruba case on his computer while he was out buying coffee.

Neither Gamarra, senior police officials nor prosecutors would provide details of the alleged confession, which came on Van der Sloot's third full day in Peruvian custody at criminal police headquarters.

Meanwhile, the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant quoted the suspect's lawyer in the Netherlands as suggesting the confession may have been coerced.


"Joran told his mother crying Monday that he was being interrogated under reasonably barbaric conditions," the paper quoted Bert De Rooij saying. "He said the police were trying to force him to confess."

Under such conditions, he said, the "confession was possibly false."

The state-appointed lawyer who represented Van der Sloot in initial interrogations, Carla Odria, told the AP that a different lawyer, who she said was hired by the suspect, was with Van der Sloot on Monday. She said she did not know the lawyer's name. Authorities would not release the name of the lawyer.

Officials at the Dutch Embassy, who said the suspect's family was attempting to obtain private counsel for Van der Sloot, could not be reached for comment Tuesday on whether a private lawyer had in fact been retained.

Van der Sloot's mother, who apparently lives in Aruba, also could not be located for comment. The suspect's father, a former judge and attorney on Aruba, died in February.

Flores, the daughter of a Peruvian circus empresario and former race car driver, was found beaten to death, her neck broken, in the 22-year-old Dutchman's hotel room. Police said the two met playing poker at a casino.

The chief of Peru's criminal police, Gen. Cesar Guardia, said the crime scene visit at the TAC hotel would most likely occur Wednesday. A psychological exam of the suspect is also required before a judge can decide whether he should stand trial.

Asked about the alleged confession, a brother of the victim, Enrique Flores, had no comment. "What we as a family want to do now is rest a bit and let this follow the judicial path," he said.

Video from hotel security cameras shows the two entering Van der Sloot's room together at 5 a.m. Sunday and Van der Sloot leaving alone four hours later with his bags. Police say Van der Sloot also left the hotel briefly at 8:10 a.m. and returned with two cups of coffee and bread purchased across the street at a supermarket.

Murder convictions carry a maximum of 35 years in prison in Peru, and it was not immediately clear if a confession could lead to a reduced sentence.

Van der Sloot remains the key suspect in Aruba for the 2005 disappearance of Holloway, an 18-year-old from Alabama who was on the resort island celebrating her high school graduation. He was arrested twice in the case – and gave a number of conflicting confessions, some in TV interviews – but was freed for lack of evidence.

Holloway's father, Dave, told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Tuesday that Van der Sloot should tell all he knows about the disappearance of his daughter. "Hopefully this is his last victim."

The girl's mother, Beth Holloway, said her heart and prayers were with the Flores family.

A fixture on true crime shows and in tabloids after Holloway's disappearance, Van der Sloot gained a reputation for lying – even admitting a penchant for it – and also exhibited a volatile temper. In one Dutch television interview he threw a glass of wine in a reporter's eyes. In another, he smashed a glass of water against a wall in a fury.

The 6-foot-3 (191-centimeter) Van der Sloot has been held at Peru's criminal police headquarters since arriving Saturday in a police convoy from Chile, where he was captured Thursday.

He had crossed into Chile on Monday – roughly a day after leaving the Lima hotel.

Lima's deputy medical investigator, Victor Tejada, told the AP that Flores was killed by blows with a blunt object, probably a tennis racket found in the hotel room. Guardia said her body was found face down and clothed with no indication of sexual assault.

Chilean police who questioned Van der Sloot the day of his arrest said he declared himself innocent of the Lima slaying but acknowledged knowing Flores.

There were indications Van der Sloot may have been traveling on money gained through extortion. The day of his arrest in Chile, Van der Sloot was charged in the United States with trying to extort $250,000 from Holloway's family in exchange for disclosing the location of her body and describing how she died.

U.S. prosecutors say $15,000 was transferred to a Dutch bank account in his name May 10. He arrived in Peru four days later, coinciding with the runup to a June 2-5 Latin America Poker Tour tournament with a $930,000 prize pool.

Tournament organizers said Van der Sloot did not sign up for the event, which required a $2,700 entrance fee.

Van der Sloot is an avid gambler and was known to frequent Aruba's casino hotels, one of which was where Holloway stayed.

In a lengthy 2006 interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News, Van der Sloot described drinking shots of rum with Holloway, whom he said he met while playing poker at a casino, then taking her to a beach and leaving her there around 3:30 a.m.

Two years later, a Dutch television crime reporter captured hidden-camera footage of Van der Sloot saying that after Holloway, drunk, collapsed on the beach while the two were kissing, he asked a friend to dump her body in the sea.

"I would never murder a girl," he said.

That interview prompted authorities in Aruba to reopen the case, but Van der Sloot later said he made up the whole story and he was not charged.

The crime reporter, Peter de Vries – the victim of the wine-throwing incident – reported later in 2008 that Van der Sloot was recruiting Thai women in Bangkok for sex work in the Netherlands.

Aruba's prime minister, Mike Eman, said he assured Holloway's mother Tuesday that his government is committed to pursuing any new leads in the case. He said Van der Sloot's arrest in Peru raised hope of determining what happened to the teenager.

Holloway's family has faulted Aruban investigators, saying they botched the case. Eman said he told the mother that he hopes his government can "repair some broken relationships."

[AtLast]

See, in Peru they don't have the father's "influence" they had in Aruba. So now the PR campaign begins from the Dutch.


Joran Van Der Sloot To Be Taken To Crime Scene, Peru Officials Say
FRANKLIN BRICENO | 06/ 8/10 10:20 PM | AP

LIMA, Peru — Peruvian police plan to take Joran van der Sloot, who they say has confessed to last week's killing of a 21-year-old business student in his Lima hotel room, to visit the crime scene, officials said Tuesday.

They also said police have until the weekend to file criminal charges against the Dutchman in the May 30 killing of Stephany Flores.

The beating death occurred exactly five years after U.S. teenager Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba – an assumed death in which Van der Sloot has long been considered the prime suspect by authorities on the Dutch Caribbean island.

It wasn't clear if Van der Sloot has obtained private counsel, and there was no immediate word from either him or his family about the reported confession.

Peru's chief police spokesman, Col. Abel Gamarra, told The Associated Press late Monday that Van der Sloot confessed earlier in the day.

Several Peruvian media outlets reported, without identifying their sources, that he admitted to killing Flores in a rage after learning she looked up information about his past on his laptop without permission.

The newspaper La Republica said Van der Sloot tearfully confessed, in the presence of a prosecutor and a state-appointed attorney, to grabbing Flores by the neck and hitting her because she had viewed images about the Aruba case on his computer while he was out buying coffee.

Neither Gamarra, senior police officials nor prosecutors would provide details of the alleged confession, which came on Van der Sloot's third full day in Peruvian custody at criminal police headquarters.

Meanwhile, the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant quoted the suspect's lawyer in the Netherlands as suggesting the confession may have been coerced.


"Joran told his mother crying Monday that he was being interrogated under reasonably barbaric conditions," the paper quoted Bert De Rooij saying. "He said the police were trying to force him to confess."

Under such conditions, he said, the "confession was possibly false."

The state-appointed lawyer who represented Van der Sloot in initial interrogations, Carla Odria, told the AP that a different lawyer, who she said was hired by the suspect, was with Van der Sloot on Monday. She said she did not know the lawyer's name. Authorities would not release the name of the lawyer.

Officials at the Dutch Embassy, who said the suspect's family was attempting to obtain private counsel for Van der Sloot, could not be reached for comment Tuesday on whether a private lawyer had in fact been retained.

Van der Sloot's mother, who apparently lives in Aruba, also could not be located for comment. The suspect's father, a former judge and attorney on Aruba, died in February.

Flores, the daughter of a Peruvian circus empresario and former race car driver, was found beaten to death, her neck broken, in the 22-year-old Dutchman's hotel room. Police said the two met playing poker at a casino.

The chief of Peru's criminal police, Gen. Cesar Guardia, said the crime scene visit at the TAC hotel would most likely occur Wednesday. A psychological exam of the suspect is also required before a judge can decide whether he should stand trial.

Asked about the alleged confession, a brother of the victim, Enrique Flores, had no comment. "What we as a family want to do now is rest a bit and let this follow the judicial path," he said.

Video from hotel security cameras shows the two entering Van der Sloot's room together at 5 a.m. Sunday and Van der Sloot leaving alone four hours later with his bags. Police say Van der Sloot also left the hotel briefly at 8:10 a.m. and returned with two cups of coffee and bread purchased across the street at a supermarket.

Murder convictions carry a maximum of 35 years in prison in Peru, and it was not immediately clear if a confession could lead to a reduced sentence.

Van der Sloot remains the key suspect in Aruba for the 2005 disappearance of Holloway, an 18-year-old from Alabama who was on the resort island celebrating her high school graduation. He was arrested twice in the case – and gave a number of conflicting confessions, some in TV interviews – but was freed for lack of evidence.

Holloway's father, Dave, told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Tuesday that Van der Sloot should tell all he knows about the disappearance of his daughter. "Hopefully this is his last victim."

The girl's mother, Beth Holloway, said her heart and prayers were with the Flores family.

A fixture on true crime shows and in tabloids after Holloway's disappearance, Van der Sloot gained a reputation for lying – even admitting a penchant for it – and also exhibited a volatile temper. In one Dutch television interview he threw a glass of wine in a reporter's eyes. In another, he smashed a glass of water against a wall in a fury.

The 6-foot-3 (191-centimeter) Van der Sloot has been held at Peru's criminal police headquarters since arriving Saturday in a police convoy from Chile, where he was captured Thursday.

He had crossed into Chile on Monday – roughly a day after leaving the Lima hotel.

Lima's deputy medical investigator, Victor Tejada, told the AP that Flores was killed by blows with a blunt object, probably a tennis racket found in the hotel room. Guardia said her body was found face down and clothed with no indication of sexual assault.

Chilean police who questioned Van der Sloot the day of his arrest said he declared himself innocent of the Lima slaying but acknowledged knowing Flores.

There were indications Van der Sloot may have been traveling on money gained through extortion. The day of his arrest in Chile, Van der Sloot was charged in the United States with trying to extort $250,000 from Holloway's family in exchange for disclosing the location of her body and describing how she died.

U.S. prosecutors say $15,000 was transferred to a Dutch bank account in his name May 10. He arrived in Peru four days later, coinciding with the runup to a June 2-5 Latin America Poker Tour tournament with a $930,000 prize pool.

Tournament organizers said Van der Sloot did not sign up for the event, which required a $2,700 entrance fee.

Van der Sloot is an avid gambler and was known to frequent Aruba's casino hotels, one of which was where Holloway stayed.

In a lengthy 2006 interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News, Van der Sloot described drinking shots of rum with Holloway, whom he said he met while playing poker at a casino, then taking her to a beach and leaving her there around 3:30 a.m.

Two years later, a Dutch television crime reporter captured hidden-camera footage of Van der Sloot saying that after Holloway, drunk, collapsed on the beach while the two were kissing, he asked a friend to dump her body in the sea.

"I would never murder a girl," he said.

That interview prompted authorities in Aruba to reopen the case, but Van der Sloot later said he made up the whole story and he was not charged.

The crime reporter, Peter de Vries – the victim of the wine-throwing incident – reported later in 2008 that Van der Sloot was recruiting Thai women in Bangkok for sex work in the Netherlands.

Aruba's prime minister, Mike Eman, said he assured Holloway's mother Tuesday that his government is committed to pursuing any new leads in the case. He said Van der Sloot's arrest in Peru raised hope of determining what happened to the teenager.

Holloway's family has faulted Aruban investigators, saying they botched the case. Eman said he told the mother that he hopes his government can "repair some broken relationships."


I figured the confession would be questioned. But, everyone should be tried fairly, even this young sociopath. The evidence will convict him if it goes to court. If he is in a prision in Peru, I don't think he will survive, which I bet his mother is quite aware of. This guy needs to be kept away from society, but, I have to admit, the prison conditions in many other countries are horrible and inhumane. Not really keen on this.

I sure have a lot of respect for the victim's families (both in Peru and the US). They are trying to stay calm in a very difficult and painful situation. There is some human grace being displayed here. I feel like answers to what really happened to Natalee are so very close.

[Toughy]

Considering Peru's history of the last 75 years, I am truly amazed the maximum sentence for murder is 35 years. I didn't expect the death penalty.....the US is the only 'civilized' country with a death penalty.......but I would have thought life in prison....no parole would be possible.

[Toughy]

Truth is stranger than fiction.....

http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/saudi-clerics-advocate-adult-breast-feeding/19504280


Saudi Clerics Advocate Adult Breast-Feeding

(June 5) -- Women in Saudi Arabia should give their breast milk to male colleagues and acquaintances in order to avoid breaking strict Islamic law forbidding mixing between the sexes, two powerful Saudi clerics have said. They are at odds, however, over precisely how the milk should be conveyed.

A fatwa issued recently about adult breast-feeding to establish "maternal relations" and preclude the possibility of sexual contact has resulted in a week's worth of newspaper headlines in Saudi Arabia. Some have found the debate so bizarre that they're calling for stricter regulations about how and when fatwas should be issued.

Sheikh Al Obeikan, an adviser to the royal court and consultant to the Ministry of Justice, set off a firestorm of controversy recently when he said on TV that women who come into regular contact with men who aren't related to them ought to give them their breast milk so they will be considered relatives.

"The man should take the milk, but not directly from the breast of the woman," Al Obeikan said, according to Gulf News. "He should drink it and then becomes a relative of the family, a fact that allows him to come in contact with the women without breaking Islam's rules about mixing."


there is more in the link.....shaking my head

[SuperFemme]

my boobs hurt.

and before anyone asks? NO. :blink:


Truth is stranger than fiction.....

http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/saudi-clerics-advocate-adult-breast-feeding/19504280


Saudi Clerics Advocate Adult Breast-Feeding

(June 5) -- Women in Saudi Arabia should give their breast milk to male colleagues and acquaintances in order to avoid breaking strict Islamic law forbidding mixing between the sexes, two powerful Saudi clerics have said. They are at odds, however, over precisely how the milk should be conveyed.

A fatwa issued recently about adult breast-feeding to establish "maternal relations" and preclude the possibility of sexual contact has resulted in a week's worth of newspaper headlines in Saudi Arabia. Some have found the debate so bizarre that they're calling for stricter regulations about how and when fatwas should be issued.

Sheikh Al Obeikan, an adviser to the royal court and consultant to the Ministry of Justice, set off a firestorm of controversy recently when he said on TV that women who come into regular contact with men who aren't related to them ought to give them their breast milk so they will be considered relatives.

"The man should take the milk, but not directly from the breast of the woman," Al Obeikan said, according to Gulf News. "He should drink it and then becomes a relative of the family, a fact that allows him to come in contact with the women without breaking Islam's rules about mixing."


there is more in the link.....shaking my head

[AtLast]

Mexican officials decry U.S. Border Patrol shooting of teenager
By William Booth
Thursday, June 10, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican leaders on Wednesday condemned the fatal shooting of a Mexican teenager by the U.S. Border Patrol at the border in El Paso, as U.S. officials scrambled to investigate the circumstances surrounding the second killing of a Mexican by a U.S. agent in two weeks.

Full article-

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/09/AR2010060903823.html

[UofMfan]

Joran Van Der Sloot Told Chile Police Thief Killed Stephany Flores

FRANKLIN BRICENO | 06/13/10 02:02 PM | AP

LIMA, Peru — Joran van der Sloot told police in Chile that it was an unidentified robber who beat a young woman to death in his hotel room, a killing for which the Dutchman has been charged with murder in Peru.

Peruvian police say Van der Sloot, long suspected in the 2005 disappearance of U.S. teen Natalee Holloway, has confessed to killing 21-year-old business student Stephany Flores on May 30 after they met playing poker.

But according to a Chilean police report obtained by The Associated Press through Peruvian authorities late Saturday, Van der Sloot gave a different account of events while in custody in neighboring Chile, where he was captured after the killing and quickly extradited.

In the version offered to Chilean investigators, Van der Sloot said he and Flores were surprised in the early morning by two robbers in an apparent assault.

"A man came out of the bathroom blocking the access door with a knife in his hand. On the bed was another man with a gun," the Spanish-language report quotes him as saying. "The man with the knife said to be quiet, but Stephany began talking in a loud voice and he hit her in the face, making her nose bleed."

It also says Van der Sloot told Chilean agents that the previous day, he and Flores had been extorted by apparent police officers who demanded $4,000 and a wristwatch he brought from Thailand.

Chilean police told their Peruvian colleagues that the 22-year-old Dutchman responded in English to their questioning but refused to sign a declaration after learning he would be expelled to Peru.

On Friday, a Peruvian judge ordered Van der Sloot jailed on first-degree murder and robbery charges.

Police in Peru say he confessed to beating Flores to death after she learned details of the Holloway case from his laptop. He allegedly broke her nose, strangled her, threw her to the floor, then emptied her wallet and drove away in her SUV, said Gen. Cesar Guardia, chief of the criminal police. He then traveled south to Chile by bus.

If convicted on the murder and robbery charges, Van der Sloot could get 15 to 35 years in prison.

Van der Sloot's newly hired Peruvian attorney, Maximo Altez, has asked the judge to declare his client's confession void on the grounds it was made in the presence of a defense lawyer appointed by police.

Van der Sloot remains the lone suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway on the Caribbean resort island of Aruba.

Peru's criminal police chief said recently that Van der Sloot told interrogators he knows where Holloway's body is, but Aruba's attorney general said Friday he is skeptical Van der Sloot was telling the truth.

[AtLast]

Joran Van Der Sloot Told Chile Police Thief Killed Stephany Flores

FRANKLIN BRICENO | 06/13/10 02:02 PM | AP

LIMA, Peru — Joran van der Sloot told police in Chile that it was an unidentified robber who beat a young woman to death in his hotel room, a killing for which the Dutchman has been charged with murder in Peru.

Peruvian police say Van der Sloot, long suspected in the 2005 disappearance of U.S. teen Natalee Holloway, has confessed to killing 21-year-old business student Stephany Flores on May 30 after they met playing poker.

But according to a Chilean police report obtained by The Associated Press through Peruvian authorities late Saturday, Van der Sloot gave a different account of events while in custody in neighboring Chile, where he was captured after the killing and quickly extradited.

In the version offered to Chilean investigators, Van der Sloot said he and Flores were surprised in the early morning by two robbers in an apparent assault.

"A man came out of the bathroom blocking the access door with a knife in his hand. On the bed was another man with a gun," the Spanish-language report quotes him as saying. "The man with the knife said to be quiet, but Stephany began talking in a loud voice and he hit her in the face, making her nose bleed."

It also says Van der Sloot told Chilean agents that the previous day, he and Flores had been extorted by apparent police officers who demanded $4,000 and a wristwatch he brought from Thailand.

Chilean police told their Peruvian colleagues that the 22-year-old Dutchman responded in English to their questioning but refused to sign a declaration after learning he would be expelled to Peru.

On Friday, a Peruvian judge ordered Van der Sloot jailed on first-degree murder and robbery charges.

Police in Peru say he confessed to beating Flores to death after she learned details of the Holloway case from his laptop. He allegedly broke her nose, strangled her, threw her to the floor, then emptied her wallet and drove away in her SUV, said Gen. Cesar Guardia, chief of the criminal police. He then traveled south to Chile by bus.

If convicted on the murder and robbery charges, Van der Sloot could get 15 to 35 years in prison.

Van der Sloot's newly hired Peruvian attorney, Maximo Altez, has asked the judge to declare his client's confession void on the grounds it was made in the presence of a defense lawyer appointed by police.

Van der Sloot remains the lone suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway on the Caribbean resort island of Aruba.

Peru's criminal police chief said recently that Van der Sloot told interrogators he knows where Holloway's body is, but Aruba's attorney general said Friday he is skeptical Van der Sloot was telling the truth.



Have you been following how Peru enters mitigating factors into sentencing? One is that he admited being high on grass during the killing. That will be considered as mitigating under Peruvian sentencing! Also, he stated he slapped him and said he began attacking her in self-defense! Yanno, he is not a small man and you break someone's neck because she slapped you? He has all the classic blame everyone and everthing else for my actions of a sociopath and narcissistic personality. And of course, I think van der Sloot is lying through his teeth.

My hope is, although it would be very difficult, is that his mother faces what her son is and has done and starts talking. She has to have information about the Aruba crime and has kept her mouth shut.

Oh, and we can only guess at what will be made of the fact that this young woman was a lesbian....

But, if he will only serve a few years for the murder in Peru, his attorney is not going to let him or anyone speak about the Hollaway case.

[UofMfan]

Have you been following how Peru enters mitigating factors into sentencing?

Yes I have. I have been following the entire case very closely.

As a mother, I doubt very much that his mother will open her mouth. Unless she gets a deal out of it, meaning reduce sentence for him, etc, she will keep her mouth shut.

[AtLast]

Yes I have. I have been following the entire case very closely.

As a mother, I doubt very much that his mother will open her mouth. Unless she gets a deal out of it, meaning reduce sentence for him, etc, she will keep her mouth shut.

I know, I don't know if I could pit myself against my kid in a legal situation no matter what he did. I would hope, however, I would see the need for his not being in the general population due to the fact that he is anti-social and dangerous. I would want him in treatment while incarcerated. Then, again, she has to believe he did these things. And what is her own guilt level about raising a killer, if she does?

It sounds like the prison he will be in is not a place of safety for prisoners. I'd be thinking about his treatment there and safety. I am thinking that Peru has light sentences due to what their prisons are like! I actually don't agree with this kind of treatment, even though this guy needs to be held accountable. Remember what happened to Dalhmer (sp??)!

The Holloway family members that have been interviewed have certainly demonstrated graciousness. Reminding me very much of the Alabama I knew, actually. If this were my child, I don't think I could be that gracious!! Have to hand it to them and I sure hope they recover Natalee's remains, but doubt it.

[afixer]

Lightning (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127853137&sc=fb&cc=fp)



poor jesus :(

[AtLast]

Lightning (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127853137&sc=fb&cc=fp)



poor jesus :(

That was one big !Jees-us

:byebye:

[Lady Pamela]

Salt Lake city Oil Spill

News:

http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2010/06/13/breaking-400-barrel-oil-spill-in-salt-lake-city/

pictures:

Pictures of liberty park is in the park I go to the drum circle at. Only a few blocks from me.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=460&sid=11142432&pid=12

[AtLast]

Salt Lake city Oil Spill

News:

http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2010/06/13/breaking-400-barrel-oil-spill-in-salt-lake-city/

pictures:

Pictures of liberty park is in the park I go to the drum circle at. Only a few blocks from me.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=460&sid=11142432&pid=12



And many think this isn't a big deal! What the hell is wrong with people!

[MsDemeanor]

Lightning (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127853137&sc=fb&cc=fp)



poor jesus :(
The link to the story on the Cincinnati Enquirer web site this morning was:
"Jesus statue destroyed by act of God"

Priceless...

[UofMfan]

Campbell Soup recalls 15M pounds of SpaghettiOs
By MARY CLARE JALONICK, Associated Press Writer M– Fri Jun 18, 7:07 am ET

WASHINGTON – Campbell Soup Co. is recalling 15 million pounds of SpaghettiOs with meatballs after a cooker malfunctioned at one of the company's plants in Texas and left the meat undercooked.

The Agriculture Department announced the recall late Thursday. Campbell spokesman Anthony Sanzio said the company is recalling certain lots of the product manufactured since December 2008 "out of an abundance of caution" because officials don't know exactly when the cooker at the Paris, Texas, plant malfunctioned. Officials believe it happened recently but aren't sure, he said.

The meatballs that went through the cooker did not get the requisite amount of heat, according to the company.

Recalled are certain lots of three varieties of the pasta product often consumed by children: SpaghettiOs with Meatballs, SpaghettiOs A to Z with Meatballs, and SpaghettiOs Fun Shapes with Meatballs (Cars).

The USDA said there are no reports of illnesses associated with the product and Sanzio said the company has received no customer complaints to date.

The recalled products have "EST 4K," as well as a use-by date between June 2010 and December 2011 printed on the bottom of the can. The products were manufactured between December 2008 and June 2010 and distributed to retail establishments nationwide.

Sanzio said the company believes there are about 35,000 cases of SpaghettiOs subject to the recall on the market right now. He said USDA announced the recall of 15 million pounds because that is all of the product that has been manufactured since December 2008. Much of it has likely been consumed.

Consumers with questions about the recall can call Campbell's Hotline at (866) 495-3774.

[Andrew, Jr.]

Nestle which owns Purina, is having a major problem with finding the ingrediants for the salmon. All flavors of salmon, and both dry and wet food.

I was in PetsMart today and there was a huge sign up. PetsMart hasn't limited how much a customer can buy yet. I am sure that is coming.

[UofMfan]

AtLast, here is the Mother's first public statement. I am guessing she is hoping for the "insanity" defense to work. Notice how she states she doesn't think he killed Holloway but blames the media for his mental deterioration.


Joran Van Der Sloot Mentally Ill, Mother Says

TOBY STERLING | 06/20/10 09:18 AM | AP

AMSTERDAM — Joran van der Sloot, the main suspect in the killing of a young woman in Peru last month and in the 2005 disappearance of U.S. teenager Natalee Holloway, suffers from mental problems, his mother told a Dutch newspaper in an interview published on its website Sunday.

"My son is sick in his head," De Telegraaf quoted Anita van der Sloot as saying in her first public comment since her son's latest arrest.

Joran van der Sloot, 22, has been jailed in Peru on suspicion of killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores on May 30 – five years to the day after Holloway's still-unsolved disappearance while on vacation in Aruba. Holloway was last seen alive with Van der Sloot.

Police in Peru say Van der Sloot has confessed to killing Flores. He is due to be interviewed by a judge in Lima next week.

The Van der Sloot family lives in Aruba, where the interview was conducted. Anita told the paper her son had abruptly disappeared in mid-May two days before he was due to travel to the Netherlands to stay at a mental institution. He left a note saying he was going to Peru.

Van der Sloot had been traveling the world but returned to Aruba in April after his father Paul died of a heart attack while playing tennis.

Van der Sloot confessed to, then later retracted, involvement in Holloway's disappearance several times publicly and privately. He has told his jailers in Peru he is ready to clarify the Holloway case – but only with Aruba authorities.

In the Telegraaf interview Anita told the paper she does not believe Joran killed Holloway.

"But if he killed Stephany, he'll have to pay the price. I won't visit him in his cell, I cannot embrace him," she was quoted saying.

She said Joran's mental health had deteriorated steadily from the time of the Holloway disappearance. She attributed his decline in part to intense media scrutiny.

She told the paper he had called her several days before Flores' death.

"He said he was being followed. He had been arrested together with a girl and robbed. He was not making sense," the paper quoted her as saying.

"I can't cry for Joran like I did for Paul. I hope that he gets psychological help."

[UofMfan]

Gay Workers To Get Family Leave From New Labor Department Regulations

PHILIP ELLIOTT | 06/21/10 08:00 PM | AP


WASHINGTON — The Labor Department intends to issue regulations this week ordering businesses to give gay employees equal treatment under a law permitting workers unpaid time off to care for newborns or loved ones.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis planned to announce Wednesday that the government would require employers to extend the option that has been available to heterosexual workers for almost two decades, two officials briefed on the plan said Monday. Neither was authorized to speak publicly ahead of the announcement.

The move, coming less than five months before November's congressional elections, seemed likely to incite conservatives and Republicans who stood in lockstep against the Obama administration's earlier efforts to repeal a ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. It also appeared likely to be popular with loyal Democrats and organized labor.

The Family and Medical Leave Act allows workers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave each year to take care of loved ones or themselves. The 1993 law, which also allows employees to take time off for adoptions, has previously only been applied to heterosexual couples.

The Labor Department planned to extend those rights based on a new interpretation of the law, the officials said. There was no plan to ask Congress to change the law, which means future presidents could reverse the decision.

President Barack Obama and his administration have slowly rolled out policies to help gays and lesbians, who supported his candidacy but have soured on what they consider his slow pace in making incremental instead of wholesale changes. He planned to meet with gay activists Tuesday at the White House, the second time such a reception has been held at the executive mansion.

Gay activists have been frustrated with Obama's approach to gay policies. The White House reluctantly backed a compromise on the military's "don't ask don't tell" policy on gays in the military that would move ahead on repeal but still allow the Pentagon time to implement new policies.

Earlier this month, Obama issued orders for government agencies to extend child care services and expanded family leave to their workers. Obama's order for federal employees, though, covers only benefits that can be extended under existing law, without congressional action. Legislative action would be required for a full range of health care and other benefits.

Last year, Obama gave federal workers' same-sex partners a first round of benefits including visitation and dependent-care rights. He also authorized child-care services and subsidies; more flexibility to use family leave to attend to the needs of domestic partners and their children; relocation benefits; giving domestic partners the same status as family members when federal appointments are made; and access to credit union and other memberships when those are provided to federal workers.

[SuperFemme]

Texas GOP platform:
criminalize gay
marriage and ban
sodomy, outlaw strip
clubs and pornography

Aliyah Shahid
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, June 22nd 2010, 12:36 PM

The GOP there has voted on a platform that
would ban oral and anal sex. It also would give
jail sentences to anyone who issues a marriage
license to a same-sex couple (even though such
licenses are already invalid in the state).

“We oppose the legalization of sodomy,” the
platform says. “We demand that Congress
exercise its authority granted by the U.S.
Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the
federal courts from cases involving sodomy.”

The Lone Star state initially passed a law barring
sodomy in 1860. Violators faced anywhere from
five to 15 years in prison. The ban was
overturned in 2003.

In addition, the platform says that homosexuality
“tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the
breakdown of the family unit and leads to the
spread of dangerous communicable diseases.”

It also states that homosexuality must not be
presented as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle
in public schools and “family” should not be
redefined to include homosexual couples.

The 25-page proposal, presented last week as a
guide for the state GOP over the next two years,
includes other measures including outlawing
“sexually oriented businesses” like strip clubs
and banning “all pornography.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/fdcp?1277265821564

[MsDemeanor]

McChrystal got the boot. Good riddance,

[AtLast]

McChrystal got the boot. Good riddance,

I so agree! Frankly, he should be court marshaled for insubordination. Tarnish that record, oh, that‘s right it has been in the past….. ! Now, what kinds of policy changes in Afghanistan will there be? Our troops need to have decent policy. Let’s not end up with them coming home like those serving in Vietnam did. Not fair to them. I just want them all home safe and sound with honor.

I am so sick of bigoted reactions to having an African American president! He is the Commander in Chief, period! And legitimately elected, not like Dumb-Dumb Dubya’!!

[AtLast]

AtLast, here is the Mother's first public statement. I am guessing she is hoping for the "insanity" defense to work. Notice how she states she doesn't think he killed Holloway but blames the media for his mental deterioration.


Joran Van Der Sloot Mentally Ill, Mother Says

TOBY STERLING | 06/20/10 09:18 AM | AP

AMSTERDAM — Joran van der Sloot, the main suspect in the killing of a young woman in Peru last month and in the 2005 disappearance of U.S. teenager Natalee Holloway, suffers from mental problems, his mother told a Dutch newspaper in an interview published on its website Sunday.

"My son is sick in his head," De Telegraaf quoted Anita van der Sloot as saying in her first public comment since her son's latest arrest.

Joran van der Sloot, 22, has been jailed in Peru on suspicion of killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores on May 30 – five years to the day after Holloway's still-unsolved disappearance while on vacation in Aruba. Holloway was last seen alive with Van der Sloot.

Police in Peru say Van der Sloot has confessed to killing Flores. He is due to be interviewed by a judge in Lima next week.

The Van der Sloot family lives in Aruba, where the interview was conducted. Anita told the paper her son had abruptly disappeared in mid-May two days before he was due to travel to the Netherlands to stay at a mental institution. He left a note saying he was going to Peru.

Van der Sloot had been traveling the world but returned to Aruba in April after his father Paul died of a heart attack while playing tennis.

Van der Sloot confessed to, then later retracted, involvement in Holloway's disappearance several times publicly and privately. He has told his jailers in Peru he is ready to clarify the Holloway case – but only with Aruba authorities.

In the Telegraaf interview Anita told the paper she does not believe Joran killed Holloway.

"But if he killed Stephany, he'll have to pay the price. I won't visit him in his cell, I cannot embrace him," she was quoted saying.

She said Joran's mental health had deteriorated steadily from the time of the Holloway disappearance. She attributed his decline in part to intense media scrutiny.

She told the paper he had called her several days before Flores' death.

"He said he was being followed. He had been arrested together with a girl and robbed. He was not making sense," the paper quoted her as saying.

"I can't cry for Joran like I did for Paul. I hope that he gets psychological help."


And the denial continues.... I get part of her as a mother, but, oh, brother! Amazing how blame goes everywhere but to the perp!

It could be that he showed signs of mental illness earlier in life and his parents shined it on. Frankly, they are culpable too as far as I'm concerned. I have always felt his father had something to do with the Holloway case and it was covered up because he was an Aruban judge. I think his mother has information and has never been up front with what she knows.

I don't have a problem with him getting psychological help... in prison!

My guess is that his mother is also learning of the kind of place the Peruvian prison is that he will serve time in. His life will be in danger- there won't be any protective custody. Prison murders happen there all of the time via pay-offs. The victim's family is powerful and has money.

I so want the Holloway family to have Natalee's remains and know what really happened to her. I just can't imagine how they feel.

Just keep this bastard off the streets!

[Sabine Gallais]

The whole McChrystal thing is a sham. All of this is a media distraction--of which we’ve all become painfully aware and accustomed to. McChrystal is being sacrificed, i.e., thrown under the bus, in order to create yet another diversion. These guys are all in the pockets of corporate, drug war and military interests. This whole thing is a charade. It’s all smoke and mirrors. The fact is that Afghanistan is all about the gas pipeline that runs from Turkmenistan through that country. And of course, it’s also about the drug trade. This disinformation campaign is as useful as the war itself. Are folks paying attention to what's behind the curtain of lies dropped before us by the media?

[Andrew, Jr.]

I would like to know what happened with the writer who actually wrote down what General McCrystal stated. Was it really word for word or what? No matter. If you are in the military you just do not bad mouth the Vice President or President of the US. It does not matter what rank you have. The military teaches this from boot camp all the way through and until someone retires. I think General McCrystal did the right thing by stepping aside and resigning. He will still get his retirement. It is all about respect.

On another note, who in the world is giving this man his advice? I think this person needs to go.

[Rufusboi]

The whole McChrystal thing is a sham. All of this is a media distraction--of which we’ve all become painfully aware and accustomed to. McChrystal is being sacrificed, i.e., thrown under the bus, in order to create yet another diversion. These guys are all in the pockets of corporate, drug war and military interests. This whole thing is a charade. It’s all smoke and mirrors. The fact is that Afghanistan is all about the gas pipeline that runs from Turkmenistan through that country. And of course, it’s also about the drug trade. This disinformation campaign is as useful as the war itself. Are folks paying attention to what's behind the curtain of lies dropped before us by the media?

Sabine - Do not forget about the 3 trillion plus in minerals they are planning to mine in Afganistan. The fight for control over those mineral rights are a big thing right now.

In an article in the newspaper last week, Karzai and the Talaban are in negotiations over these mineral rights.

This is becoming another Vietnam. All we want is there natural resources. Politicians and big business do not give a damn about the people there.

Rufus

[MsDemeanor]

Asshole jury.....

A jury says the city of Philadelphia cannot evict a local Boy Scouts chapter from a city-owned building for refusing to admit gays.

linkyloo (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/23/boy-scouts-can-ban-gays-a_n_623171.html)

[Toughy]

The whole McChrystal thing is a sham. All of this is a media distraction--of which we’ve all become painfully aware and accustomed to. McChrystal is being sacrificed, i.e., thrown under the bus, in order to create yet another diversion. These guys are all in the pockets of corporate, drug war and military interests. This whole thing is a charade. It’s all smoke and mirrors. The fact is that Afghanistan is all about the gas pipeline that runs from Turkmenistan through that country. And of course, it’s also about the drug trade. This disinformation campaign is as useful as the war itself. Are folks paying attention to what's behind the curtain of lies dropped before us by the media?

As a veteran IT IS NOT a sham or smoke and mirrors. McChrystal should be court-martialed for insubordination and busted down to Major and forcibly retired at Major pay. His aides who were part of that should be busted down to 1st or 2nd Lieutenant, but can stay in the Army.....good luck getting promoted for them anyway. The lack of leadership shown once again by McChrystal (and now his aides) is appalling and he has no business being on active duty. My understanding is there was alcohol involved in all this.

I would not argue about oil, opium base and rare earth minerals in Afghanistan being what's behind the curtain. Except it's not really behind the curtain........the info has been out there for years and years.....

[Toughy]

by Rufus
This is becoming another Vietnam. All we want is there natural resources. Politicians and big business do not give a damn about the people there.


This was like Vietnam from the get-go. I'm not sure if you think Nam was about natural resouces.........it was not. Nam was about those godless commie bastards coming to get us which was fueled by Senator Joe McCarthy and his unrelenting fear that the commies had infiltrated our government....sound familiar???

I would agree that multinational corporations don't give a shit about anything other than maximizing profits. I do think there are some politicians who do care.........Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) being the first who comes to my mind. Rep Alan Grayson is another. Rep Barbara Lee is another. Rep Sheila Jackson. There are honest and decent politicians.

[dreadgeek]

The whole McChrystal thing is a sham. All of this is a media distraction--of which we’ve all become painfully aware and accustomed to. McChrystal is being sacrificed, i.e., thrown under the bus, in order to create yet another diversion. These guys are all in the pockets of corporate, drug war and military interests. This whole thing is a charade. It’s all smoke and mirrors. The fact is that Afghanistan is all about the gas pipeline that runs from Turkmenistan through that country. And of course, it’s also about the drug trade. This disinformation campaign is as useful as the war itself. Are folks paying attention to what's behind the curtain of lies dropped before us by the media?

It MAY be a media distraction but the McChrystal thing is far from a sham. The man subverted the chain of command. Ultimately, every flag officer (generals and admirals) serve at the pleasure of the Defense Secretary. It is a cornerstone of our military that soldiers answer to the civilian leadership not the other way around. Not only did McChrystal subvert the authority of the President with his comments this is not the first time he has done so. He has, at least two other times in the last 18 months, stated that he either disagreed with the policy OR stated policy himself!

Now, here on BFP that may not mean much. In most academic and policy circles that probably means even less. But to a 24 year old soldier, serving his third or fourth overseas tour in 6 years, standing post in some forsaken part of Afghanistan it matters quite a deal that the chain of command is intact. We ask our soldiers to go and do horrible and unthinkable things. Horrible, unthinkable things that 99% of us will never even work up the ovaries to volunteer to do! They are trained to do a job that every sane person hopes they will never have to do. However, when they DO have to do that job--horrible as it might be--they will do so believing that their orders are legitimate and follow a clear chain of command. That chain of command starts at the POTUS and continues down through the SecDef and then through the flag officers and so on.

Now, I will admit I was not a general. I wasn't an officer, I was a lowly sergeant. However, my job was not to make national policy. It wasn't the job of my commanding officer to make national policy. It wasn't the job of HIS commanding officer to do so either and on up the chain. Policy is set by the civilians and soldiers carry out the policy. That is the way it works in every liberal democracy and it is why, whatever else has happened, we have never had any serious danger of falling into a military dictatorship. McChrystal's job is to define doctrine and strategy in pursuit of whatever policy the civilian leadership has defined. If the policy is ill-considered, it is his duty, as a flag officer, to tell the civilian leadership "with all due respect, this is probably a really, really bad idea". It is *not* his job to end-run around the civilian leadership, go to the press and say that he is not onboard the policy as defined.

What's more what he did was galactically stupid. If you or I talk to some reporter from Rolling Stone it's probably not safe to assume that it's off the record. If, however, you are a four-star general, commander of a major operation of the U.S. military, ANY conversation with ANY reporter should be assumed to be on-the-record and your responses should reflect that. This guy got sloppy and started shooting his mouth off.

As far as the hidden interests--being aware of those issues (which I am) is not mutually exclusive to understanding that McChrystal stepped WAY out of line. He would have cashiered his adjunct or any other member of his staff if THEY had, for instance, given an interview to Stars and Stripes where they had done the same because it would subvert his command.

The facts you mention--and I don't dispute any of them--will still obtain whether McChrystal kept his job or Petraeus steps in or someone else. We have no legitimate national interest in Afghanistan at this point and should adjust our policy accordingly.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

As a veteran IT IS NOT a sham or smoke and mirrors. McChrystal should be court-martialed for insubordination and busted down to Major and forcibly retired at Major pay. His aides who were part of that should be busted down to 1st or 2nd Lieutenant, but can stay in the Army.....good luck getting promoted for them anyway. The lack of leadership shown once again by McChrystal (and now his aides) is appalling and he has no business being on active duty. My understanding is there was alcohol involved in all this.

I would not argue about oil, opium base and rare earth minerals in Afghanistan being what's behind the curtain. Except it's not really behind the curtain........the info has been out there for years and years.....

Thank you, Toughy. It's almost axiomatic that Afghanistan is where empires go to die--it broke the Red Army and eventually the Soviet Union. It gave the British Army a moment of pause and now it is giving the American military that same moment of pause. Yes, there's lots of resources there and that certainly has every mining company from here to Johannesburg salivating at the prospects. My problem is that there is no longer any *strategic* interest in Afghanistan.

Yes, it's right at the crux of two nuclear armed states one of which is seriously unstable--but, quite honestly, I see that as being more India or China's problem than the United States'.

Cheers
Aj

[Ebon]

http://www.tgctr.org/2010/06/23/transman-bashed-at-hcc-campus/?awesm=fbshare.me_AOaTj

[AtLast]

As a veteran IT IS NOT a sham or smoke and mirrors. McChrystal should be court-martialed for insubordination and busted down to Major and forcibly retired at Major pay. His aides who were part of that should be busted down to 1st or 2nd Lieutenant, but can stay in the Army.....good luck getting promoted for them anyway. The lack of leadership shown once again by McChrystal (and now his aides) is appalling and he has no business being on active duty. My understanding is there was alcohol involved in all this.

I would not argue about oil, opium base and rare earth minerals in Afghanistan being what's behind the curtain. Except it's not really behind the curtain........the info has been out there for years and years.....

Absolute insubordination! It appears that McCrystal is a very heavy drinker (past military records show this). Now, that is scary to me..... the guy was in charge and most likely an alcoholic?

It will be interesting to see what Obama does at this point. You know, I have to say that he has had so damn much serious stuff to deal with right out of the gate! I, oh, so want him to have better advisors. Who the hell can keep up with all of this!

This is an area where faulty policy has gone for years. Dreadgeek brings up much of the issues in her post.

[Sabine Gallais]

.......IT IS NOT a sham or smoke and mirrors. McChrystal should be court-martialed for insubordination and busted down to Major and forcibly retired at Major pay.......

This might be true if you actually believe that McChrystal is not part of all the lies, coverups, and scandals in our military, government and media. You really think there is some authentic, functioning military strata that isn't corrupt? You don't believe that he is another willing sacrifice @ the altar of deceit? Or, that he was operating in a fish bowl? Sure, one could argue that the comments were in poor judgment, but he was actually being honest about the inept leadership in Washington.

And guess what? The timing of the release of the Rolling Stone article was also a PR stunt. Bear in mind how convenient it is for Rolling Stone that the inflammatory material comes from people who don’t have names. Reporters and writers place words into the mouths of unnamed sources because people who aren’t identified rarely complain of being misquoted.

This business today is worse than a dog chasing its tail. It’s more like a dog chasing its tail after another dog chewed it off; and it’s all just in order to save face and buy some time. That’s when the military becomes a PR machine, and nobody knows who to believe any longer. Remember, all wars are waged for domination and control of resources. I think we've all come to that obvious conclusion. But the bottom line is that McChrystal is waist deep in a propaganda campaign right alongside his boss. I mean, gosh. Just look how the controversy developed in the first place: at Rolling Stone magazine for God’s sakes. Could it get more obvious? Really. We don't see how easily we are being played?

Why does the McChrystal-Tillman connection keep getting ignored?

[dreadgeek]

This might be true if you actually believe that McChrystal is not part of all the lies, coverups, and scandals in our military, government and media. You really think there is some authentic, functioning military strata that isn't corrupt? You don't believe that he is another willing sacrifice @ the altar of deceit? Or, that he was operating in a fish bowl? Sure, one could argue that the comments were in poor judgment, but he was actually being honest about the inept leadership in Washington.


He COULD be part of the lies, coverup and deceit and ALSO have broken the chain of command and subverted the authority of the CIC. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. And yes, I DO think that there is a functioning military strata because without it people die. I don't know about your military experience although I would be interested in hearing about it, but GOOD officers and GOOD NCOs have, as their primary mission, keeping their people alive. The comments WERE in poor judgement and they DID box the White House in by stating a policy that was in contradiction with the policy as stated by the civilian leadership. Generals do not make policy, they carry it out. Strategy and military doctrine are not policy, they are the instruments by which the policy is made manifest. What McChrystal did wasn't about doctrine or about strategy it was about policy.


And guess what? The timing of the release of the Rolling Stone article was also a PR stunt. Bear in mind how convenient it is for Rolling Stone that the inflammatory material comes from people who don’t have names. Reporters and writers place words into the mouths of unnamed sources because people who aren’t identified rarely complain of being misquoted.

Except McChrystal is named and quoted. Isn't it possible that Rolling Stone realized that they had lightning in a bottle and scooped EVERYONE on this? Isn't it possible that Rolling Stone got this article out because they knew it would sell papers? Hasn't Rolling Stone done real journalism in the past?


This business today is worse than a dog chasing its tail. It’s more like a dog chasing its tail after another dog chewed it off; and it’s all just in order to save face and buy some time. That’s when the military becomes a PR machine, and nobody knows who to believe any longer. Remember, all wars are waged for domination and control of resources. I think we've all come to that obvious conclusion. But the bottom line is that McChrystal is waist deep in a propaganda campaign right alongside his boss. I mean, gosh. Just look how the controversy developed in the first place: at Rolling Stone magazine for God’s sakes. Could it get more obvious? Really. We don't see how easily we are being played?

Firstly, not all wars are waged by both parties for domination and control of resources. Are you going to seriously tell me that the U.S. involvement in World War II would *not* have occurred if not for control or domination? Really? Did Germany and Japan start a war for control and domination, yes. However, Japan attacked US--we didn't attack Japan. What's more, Germany attacked the rest of Western Europe. Britain didn't attack Germany and neither did France they were attacked and they responded (in France's case quite ineffectually). I'm sorry but this idea that war is this simple phenomena carried out for simplistic reasons ignores the reality of warfare AND of geopolitics.

There is such a thing as legitimate national interest and every nation--not just my nation, not just nations allied to my nation but every single nation on the planet is justly entitled to pursue its own national interest. If they do so with a single-minded focus that may or may not be unfortunate but it is still legitimate. If we are going to admit that, for instance, Pakistan has a legitimate national interest in, say, defending themselves if they are attacked and India has a legitimate national interest in defending themselves if attacked, then I am not going to deny the United States the right to pursue its national interest. Now, does the US have a legitimate national interest in the region in play? Perhaps, perhaps not. I don't think we do although I can see ONE argument that would say otherwise.

That argument is this. India and Pakistan have fought three wars in 60 years. Both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. Pakistan is currently unstable and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that that nation could fall under the control of the Taliban. Now, if I were India's defense minister and I watched Islamabad fall under Taliban control I would be SORELY tempted to move troops to the border, put my forces on high alert and if the Pakistani's did something that looked at all threatening let loose the fateful lightning. I'm not advocating the use of nuclear weapons here--I want to make that clear. I AM advocating looking at geopolitics from the point of view of people whose day-to-day job it is to make these decisions.

I don't know why you believe that McChrystal being involved in a cover-up is mutually exclusive to his being relieved of command with just cause. Do you really believe that if his second-in-command had gone to Stars and Stripes and had gone off on the kind of rant that McChrystal did that this Colonel would still have that rank by the end of the day? No way! If his adjunct had done the same thing, McChrystal would have busted him back down to butter-bar before anyone could throw a salute--and that's if he was lucky!

Can you explain why it is mutually exclusive? Why is it that either McChrystal has clean hands (in which case it is possible that he was relieved of command for insubordination and subverting of the CIC) or he is knee-deep in a coverup (in which case there was no good cause to relieve him of command)? I don't see these things as mutually exclusive--but I was just enlisted, perhaps you can explain it to me?

Cheers
Aj

[MsDemeanor]

In the latest of a long line of things that conservatives do that bug me to no end, I'm deeply frustrated by their dismissive attitude toward serious journalism simply because of the source. "at Rolling Stone magazine for God’s sakes". Seriously? Some of the contributors to Rolling Stone have done some kick ass reporting, actual researched and thorough investigative reporting. Which is more than one can say for a lot of the MSM these days. If you disagree with the facts as presented, then argue the facts. But don't dismiss the whole thing simply because you don't approve of the publication.

[MsDemeanor]

And guess what? The timing of the release of the Rolling Stone article was also a PR stunt. Bear in mind how convenient it is for Rolling Stone that the inflammatory material comes from people who don’t have names. Reporters and writers place words into the mouths of unnamed sources because people who aren’t identified rarely complain of being misquoted.

Thanks, this entire paragraph gave me a good laugh, which I needed. There's just no end to the entertainment value of right wing paranoid conspiracy. Too bad that some folks take it seriously.

[AtLast]

In the latest of a long line of things that conservatives do that bug me to no end, I'm deeply frustrated by their dismissive attitude toward serious journalism simply because of the source. "at Rolling Stone magazine for God’s sakes". Seriously? Some of the contributors to Rolling Stone have done some kick ass reporting, actual researched and thorough investigative reporting. Which is more than one can say for a lot of the MSM these days. If you disagree with the facts as presented, then argue the facts. But don't dismiss the whole thing simply because you don't approve of the publication.

I agree with you here to the max! This whole damn thing has centered around RS. It also has many award winning jounalists on staff. Always has.

What is going on in Afghanistan is important and very complex aside from this story! For fuck sakes, people are dying there and this months number of US troops is at an all time high. I wish people would get their heads out of the sand and think about that! For the sake of these troops, Obama did the right thing.

[chefhmboyrd]

This was like Vietnam from the get-go. I'm not sure if you think Nam was about natural resouces.........it was not. Nam was about those godless commie bastards coming to get us which was fueled by Senator Joe McCarthy and his unrelenting fear that the commies had infiltrated our government....sound familiar???

I would agree that multinational corporations don't give a shit about anything other than maximizing profits. I do think there are some politicians who do care.........Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) being the first who comes to my mind. Rep Alan Grayson is another. Rep Barbara Lee is another. Rep Sheila Jackson. There are honest and decent politicians.

Nam started out as a Commie battle and eneded up a drug trafficing bonanza.
why do you think all those people OD'ed on smack. cause for the time we were in Nam, we were getting the good sh*t and people were taking too much at once thinking it was the usual crappy cut to hell horse.

it isn't talked about much, but a lot of the reason we are in Afganistan has to do with the Heroin. it is ironic that we had the War on Drugs while one hand of our government was dealing drugs for weapons and control.

i think one of the biggest trouble getting any drugs leagalzed is that too many people are making too much money on them. what they fail to realize is that they could make twice as much if it was taxed and regulated.
:canoworms:

[dreadgeek]

In the latest of a long line of things that conservatives do that bug me to no end, I'm deeply frustrated by their dismissive attitude toward serious journalism simply because of the source. "at Rolling Stone magazine for God’s sakes". Seriously? Some of the contributors to Rolling Stone have done some kick ass reporting, actual researched and thorough investigative reporting. Which is more than one can say for a lot of the MSM these days. If you disagree with the facts as presented, then argue the facts. But don't dismiss the whole thing simply because you don't approve of the publication.

It's funny that people are acting like Rolling Stone is some overgrown college newspaper with cache because it's been around for a long time. Just for giggles, I searched to see who--if anyone of note outside of Hunter S. Thompson--has ever written for Rolling Stone. Here are some of the more heavyweight ones:

Joe Klein -- Currently on the Council on Foreign Relations and a Guggenheim Fellow

Timothy Ferris -- Science writer (in fact, I'm currently reading his latest work "The Science of Liberty). Emeritus Professor at UC Berkeley (yay Cal Bears!)

Matt Taibbi -- Writer/Journalist. Most recently he wrote an exhaustive expose of Goldman Sachs

P.J. O'Rourke -- Writer and journalist


Does Rolling Stone have the same gravitas as, say, The Economist or Foreign Affairs? No, it doesn't. But that doesn't mean that RS is a fly-by-night samizdat being desktopped out of a garage by a group of kids who write articles in between bong hits.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Since I expect that the *next* meme we'll see propagated is that flag officers are *never* relieved and that it has happened, maybe, a few times in our history and since that meme is manifestly untrue, I thought I would just go ahead and cut this myth off before it can get going here.

Thomas Ricks has an excellent article on today's OpEd page of the NY Times talking about the history of firing officers who screw up. Link (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/opinion/24ricks.html?ref=opinion)

Since you have to register to read the page (registration is free) I thought I would paste in a few specific paragraphs which are particularly germane here:

FOR most of our nation’s history, the armed services have had a strong and worthy tradition of firing generals who get out of line. So for most of our presidents there would have been no question about whether to oust Gen. Stanley McChrystal for making public his differences with the White House on policy in Afghanistan. If President Obama had not fired General McChrystal, it would have been like President Truman keeping on Douglas MacArthur after his insubordination during the Korean War.

In the longer term, the Army has to return to its tradition of getting rid of leaders who are failing. The Navy has shown more fortitude; in the first two months of this year alone it fired six commanders of ships and installations.

Back in World War II, the Army had no qualms about letting officers go; at least 16 of the 155 generals who commanded divisions in combat during the war were relieved while in combat. George Marshall, the nation’s top general, felt that a willingness to fire subordinates was a requirement of leadership. He once described Gen. Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, as a fine man, but one who “didn’t have the nerve to get rid of men not worth a damn.”

The old system may seem harsh in today’s light, and certainly some men were treated unfairly. But keep in mind that job losses were dwarfed by combat losses: In the summer of 1944, 15 of the 20 battalion and regimental commanders in the 82nd Airborne were either killed or wounded. In World War II, a front-line officer either succeeded, became a casualty or was relieved within a few months — or in some cases, within days.

The tradition of swift relief provided two benefits that we have lost in today’s Army: It punished failure and it gave an opportunity to younger, more energetic officers who were better equipped to adapt to the quickening pace of the war. When George Marshall heard of a major who really was doing a general’s work, he stepped in to make the man a brigadier general overnight. Under this audacious system, a generation of brilliant young commanders emerged, men like James Gavin, an innovator in airborne warfare who became the Army’s youngest three-star general.

The meme that is going to emerge in the next week is that Obama's firing of McChrystal is this once-in-a-lifetime event with not the least bit of historical precedent---don't believe it because it simply is not true.

Cheers
Aj

[Liam]

This was like Vietnam from the get-go. I'm not sure if you think Nam was about natural resouces.........it was not. Nam was about those godless commie bastards coming to get us which was fueled by Senator Joe McCarthy and his unrelenting fear that the commies had infiltrated our government....sound familiar???

I would agree that multinational corporations don't give a shit about anything other than maximizing profits. I do think there are some politicians who do care.........Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) being the first who comes to my mind. Rep Alan Grayson is another. Rep Barbara Lee is another. Rep Sheila Jackson. There are honest and decent politicians.

Vietnam wasn't about resources?

Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United States did a study that showed that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China, now known as Vietnam.

We were in Vietnam to protect Standard Oil's assets— McCarthy's notions did a very good job of distracting folks from that reality.

[chefhmboyrd]

is it safe to assume that all wars are fought over money, money from drugs, money from oil, money from money???????????:pirate-steer:

[Apocalipstic]

War, always about money, greed and power.

[MsDemeanor]

Wars are fought for one of two reasons, and quite often a combination of both: A) resources (money, land, food, water, minerals, etc.), or B) religion. Even though Shrub seems to have done it because Sadam picked on his daddy and it was a good way to funnel lots of taxpayer dollars to his buddies at Haliburton, etc., that still falls under "resources". Governments don't decide to spend their money and kill their citizens for the fuck of it, they do it because they want something.

[MsDemeanor]

The meme that is going to emerge in the next week is that Obama's firing of McChrystal is this once-in-a-lifetime event with not the least bit of historical precedent---don't believe it because it simply is not true.

I think that Rachel had a snippet on her show yesterday that listed 5 military higher-ups axed by Shrub. Sorry, I was baking and only half paying attention.

[dreadgeek]

is it safe to assume that all wars are fought over money, money from drugs, money from oil, money from money???????????:pirate-steer:

I don't think that's a safe assumption. I really, really don't. I think it oversimplifies a VERY complicated human behavior and in so doing gets in the way of understanding.

I'm curious are we talking about ALL wars--no matter who fights them--or are we talking only about wars Americans fight or are we talking only wars that Europeans and Americans fight? Is it just modern wars or is it all wars? Are wars fought in defense of a nation also in that category? I ask because the answers to those questions kind of set the dimensions of the discussion.

If it's all wars then it brings up the problem of wars where there was not a clear-cut financial or material gain to be had.

If it's just wars that Americans fight (leaving others to have other reasons to fight wars) then it fails to explain either WW II or Korea.

If it's just wars that Europeans and Americans fight then it fails to explain WW I or WW II.


War, always about money, greed and power.

So if your nation is attacked--for whatever reason someone might do so--are you saying that your nation should NOT defend itself?

Wars are fought for one of two reasons, and quite often a combination of both: A) resources (money, land, food, water, minerals, etc.), or B) religion. Even though Shrub seems to have done it because Sadam picked on his daddy and it was a good way to funnel lots of taxpayer dollars to his buddies at Haliburton, etc., that still falls under "resources". Governments don't decide to spend their money and kill their citizens for the fuck of it, they do it because they want something.

This seems more along the lines of treating war as the complicated phenomena it is. I would, however, add the following: C) national honor and D) largely by accident. I think that most wars we might care to study fall into a combination of those four with each one having different weights.

For example---

WW I--mostly D and C with, perhaps, a sprinkling of A in the peripheries (read what was left of the Ottoman Empire). WW I, at the time it broke out, wasn't what any nation was *trying* to make happen--it just kind of happened because the various national leaderships allowed the situation to get out of hand.

WW II--mostly A and C with a sprinkling of B and D in the case of the European theatre. Hitler invaded Eastern Europe for land (lebensraum) and to rebuild the honor of the German people after the humiliation of WW I. I say D because there are things that England and France probably *could* have done that might have prevented the war but they didn't. For Japan it was A, C, D and B in that order. Japan had legitimate strategic interests in the Western Pacific--being an island nation with very few natural resources not having control of the Straits of Malacca would cause the Japanese high command no end of sleepless nights. They wanted land and control of the waters in their immediate neighborhood. In attacking the United States, they stumbled into a war that was far larger than they had anticipated.

Korea--D, A, C in that order. After WW II, with Japan defeated the Korean peninsula was partitioned on the 38th parallel. One thing led to another and the North Koreans invaded the South. The South was backed by the U.S. and the UN and the North by China and the USSR.

Vietnam--A and D in that order.

Gulf War I -- D and A with a sprinkling of C. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a HUGE miscalculation. He expected the U.S. to sit it out which, of course, we weren't about to do. He stumbled into a larger war in an attempt to grab more oil resources and regain of some Iraq's national honor after the war of attrition that nation had fought with Iran. For the United States, it was a way of redeeming the American military after Vietnam and to begin asserting a stronger presence for the US military in the region in pursuit of goals related to reason A.

Gulf War II -- A and C in that order with a sprinkling of B. The US leadership wants to establish *permanent* hegemony (beyond what we already have) in the region and Iraq is perfect for that purpose. C has to do both with the feeling of the neo-cons that Bush the Elder, Powell and Schwarzkopf didn't finish the job by getting rid of Saddam Hussein AND Bush the Younger wanted to avenge the attempt on his father's life. Oddly enough this is the only war a Western nation has been involved in that had a clear religious dimension to it.

[AtLast]

Since I expect that the *next* meme we'll see propagated is that flag officers are *never* relieved and that it has happened, maybe, a few times in our history and since that meme is manifestly untrue, I thought I would just go ahead and cut this myth off before it can get going here.

Thomas Ricks has an excellent article on today's OpEd page of the NY Times talking about the history of firing officers who screw up. Link (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/opinion/24ricks.html?ref=opinion)

Since you have to register to read the page (registration is free) I thought I would paste in a few specific paragraphs which are particularly germane here:

FOR most of our nation’s history, the armed services have had a strong and worthy tradition of firing generals who get out of line. So for most of our presidents there would have been no question about whether to oust Gen. Stanley McChrystal for making public his differences with the White House on policy in Afghanistan. If President Obama had not fired General McChrystal, it would have been like President Truman keeping on Douglas MacArthur after his insubordination during the Korean War.

In the longer term, the Army has to return to its tradition of getting rid of leaders who are failing. The Navy has shown more fortitude; in the first two months of this year alone it fired six commanders of ships and installations.

Back in World War II, the Army had no qualms about letting officers go; at least 16 of the 155 generals who commanded divisions in combat during the war were relieved while in combat. George Marshall, the nation’s top general, felt that a willingness to fire subordinates was a requirement of leadership. He once described Gen. Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, as a fine man, but one who “didn’t have the nerve to get rid of men not worth a damn.”

The old system may seem harsh in today’s light, and certainly some men were treated unfairly. But keep in mind that job losses were dwarfed by combat losses: In the summer of 1944, 15 of the 20 battalion and regimental commanders in the 82nd Airborne were either killed or wounded. In World War II, a front-line officer either succeeded, became a casualty or was relieved within a few months — or in some cases, within days.

The tradition of swift relief provided two benefits that we have lost in today’s Army: It punished failure and it gave an opportunity to younger, more energetic officers who were better equipped to adapt to the quickening pace of the war. When George Marshall heard of a major who really was doing a general’s work, he stepped in to make the man a brigadier general overnight. Under this audacious system, a generation of brilliant young commanders emerged, men like James Gavin, an innovator in airborne warfare who became the Army’s youngest three-star general.

The meme that is going to emerge in the next week is that Obama's firing of McChrystal is this once-in-a-lifetime event with not the least bit of historical precedent---don't believe it because it simply is not true.

Cheers
Aj

Thanks for the link, Aj. How anyone can believe that this is a once-in-a-lifetime event is just nuts! My academic historical background is not war history, but, there are many war historians that can be read that knock this out of the water! Going back to even Washington and Lincoln's wartime presidential decisions really shoots a whole in this claim. Then, again, just about Obama is the fodder of race linked to his being the first African US American president. Sad, but true and not surprising at all.

I have a problem with news snippet history. And these days, news programs are nothing but talking-point whores. Have to do some research and historical perspective reading to get a clearer picture of things.

[MsDemeanor]

Aj, very good points about C and D. Thank you!!!!

[Corkey]

Officers serve at the pleasure of the Commander In Chief, not the other way around. McChrystal's insubordination was unbecoming of an officer of the US Army, I am glad he has been replaced.

[dreadgeek]

I have a problem with news snippet history. And these days, news programs are nothing but talking-point whores. Have to do some research and historical perspective reading to get a clearer picture of things.

In fact, as things stand right now the modern conservative movement is *counting* on historical amnesia. The examples are legion but I'll list just a couple of ones that really have my gall up:

1) Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In fact, there appears to be NO evidence that this was the case other than the word of his niece Alveda King. However, his son says his father was not a Republican, he voted for LBJ in '64 (who, if memory serves, was a Democrat) and in his autobiography he is quoted as saying that the '64 GOP convention was a "frenzied wedding ... of the KKK and the radical right". What's more he would NOT have supported the GOP of today. Which, actually, leads to the next issue.

2) It was the Democrats that were the party of segregation and Republicans that was the party of civil rights. This is *partly* true but it does not tell the whole story. The South was solidly Democratic until the mid-1960s. As such, there were a lot of segregationists and it WAS the party of segregation--at least the Southern flank of it was. However--and this is critical to understanding what happened--after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the South started to swing toward the GOP. At this point, most of the people who had been pro-segregation Democrats (Dixiecrats) became Republicans. So it was Conservative Southern Democrats who were transformed into Republicans--they didn't shed their racism when they moved from the D column to the R column. The Republican party would like people to forget that Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott and Haley Barbour were ALL--to a man--pro-segregation Democrats who became embittered pro-segregation Republicans. One unintended consequence was the shift of the two parties---the Democratic party moved Left and the Republican party moved Right. Although, to be honest, the Republican party moved more to the Right than the Democratic party moved to the Left.

3) Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Adams, Franklin and Madison were all what we would now consider to be evangelical Christians. They were not. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Madison were all deists. Paine was an atheist. Not a SINGLE one of those men would pass muster as a Christian the way that is defined within the Religious Right, the Tea Party or the Republican party.

The list could go on and on but those are three particularly pernicious myths that the Republican party is trying to perpetuate and are hoping that Americans overall cultural amnesia will allow them to get away with the bait and switch.

Cheers
Aj

[Corkey]

I really think it's time for a review of civics and history lessons that folks supposedly learned in high school.
I have no problem with folks having opposing opinions, but this misleading and factually wrong, twisting of history and how the government works is disturbing to me. If one is unsure of the facts perhaps one shouldn't post inaccuracies that are factually wrong.

[dreadgeek]

I am not a military historian. I'm not even going to pretend that I can play a military historian on the Internet. The discussion of the firing of McChrystal and the larger issue of the Afghanistan war has me thinking, however, about how to deal with the question of warfare as a tool of geopolitics. I am not pro-war however I am what I hope is a geopolitical realist. Right now and for any foreseeable future, the way geopolitics is done one of the pieces that nations have on the board is a standing military. While I understand the reflex to condemn all war and to try to distill it down to its simplest *possible* essence, I don't know how useful it is in understanding why we get into wars, how we can avoid them in the future and how we get out of wars. For me, I think the idea that 'war is always about money or resources' actually clouds the issue and doesn't allow one to think about the subject on its own terms.

I get it that war is unpleasant. Although I was lucky enough not to see combat in my time in the military, I am the daughter and mother of combat veterans. I served under men who had fought in combat. I am not trying to argue for the glorification of war, nor am I trying to argue in favor of either action the US military is embroiled in currently. Rather, I'm trying to deal with the issue of warfare beyond either the reflexive Liberal position (always bad, we're always up to no good when we're involved in a war) and the Conservative position (kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out--as long as I don't have to do the fighting).

To do this, I think it is useful to try to deal with geopolitics using the most hard eyed, coldly realistic realpolitik we can muster. By doing so, I think it allows us to actually dig deeper into the issue.

For instance, I think we spend too much on our military and I think our current strategic posture makes no sense. Do we have legitimate national interests? Yes. Do we have legitimate transnational interests? Yes. So, I see no reason why we maintain our Cold War defense posture in Europe. It is vanishingly improbable that any two given European nations are going to war with one another and there's just no way that Russia is going to invade Western Europe anytime soon. No European nation has anything to gain by invading another and Russia has absolutely nothing to gain by invasion that they couldn't get some other way. We *never* had any legitimate strategic interest in Iraq and any strategic interest we had in Afghanistan in 2001 no longer exists. We could, I think, pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq entirely and withdraw from Europe without any significant harm being done to our national interest. On the other hand, there is a *legitimate* national and transnational interest in maintaining a naval presence in the Persian Gulf. Why? Because huge amounts of the oil used by EVERY country flows through that area and everyone--from you and I to every person who could lay their hands on a boat and some explosives--knows it. In order to keep oil prices somewhere in a region that could be called stable world markets have to have a reasonable surety that the oil will get from A to B without being blown up. To do that, you need a deep water navy. We have the best blue water navy on the planet--in fact, we have the only navy that is probably capable of making certain that the oil tankers get from point A to B. It is in the global interest for oil prices to be stable and it is in the US national interest for this to be so as well.

Now, we could wish that our civilization was not dependent upon fossil fuels and I think we should not be dependent upon them. We might wish that it didn't take a deep water navy to secure the shipping lanes. But wishing doesn't make it so. The job has to be done, the US Navy can control any large body of water and the air space above it for a few hundred miles at the time and place of their choosing. Therefore the US Navy is best positioned for the job. (As an aside, this is a legacy of both WW II where sea power was decisive and the US/NATO war plan for WW III which would be fought in Europe against the Soviets. The war plan called for the army in Europe to fight the world's greatest holding action while the navy owned the Atlantic ocean and then a huge resupply mission would be undertaken. The Russians could resupply by train, the Americans had to resupply by ship.)

It's a different way of thinking about the same subject. The reflexive Liberal response to the above is "why do we have to be in the Persian Gulf at all". The reflexive Conservative response is "withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe! Are you mad?! 9/11 and Hitler!". Neither response actually deals with the realpolitik that the SecDef and SecState as well as the POTUS and the Joint Chiefs actually have to face. It requires, on the Liberal side ,getting over the knee-jerk "if the American military did it, then it must be evil and done for some horrible purpose". Have we done things in the name of national interest we should not have done? Yes. Absolutely. But that is no reason to assume, at the outset, that any and all military actions involving the American military were undertaken for horrible, backhanded reasons or that national interest is just another word for "policy makers waking up and deciding to send a bunch of poor kids to kill a bunch of brown people because it's Thursday".

As MsD pointed out, national leaders--not ours, not anyone's--spends blood and treasure to fight a war because they are in the mood. They do it because they *want* something.

[AtLast]

In fact, as things stand right now the modern conservative movement is *counting* on historical amnesia. The examples are legion but I'll list just a couple of ones that really have my gall up:

1) Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In fact, there appears to be NO evidence that this was the case other than the word of his niece Alveda King. However, his son says his father was not a Republican, he voted for LBJ in '64 (who, if memory serves, was a Democrat) and in his autobiography he is quoted as saying that the '64 GOP convention was a "frenzied wedding ... of the KKK and the radical right". What's more he would NOT have supported the GOP of today. Which, actually, leads to the next issue.

2) It was the Democrats that were the party of segregation and Republicans that was the party of civil rights. This is *partly* true but it does not tell the whole story. The South was solidly Democratic until the mid-1960s. As such, there were a lot of segregationists and it WAS the party of segregation--at least the Southern flank of it was. However--and this is critical to understanding what happened--after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the South started to swing toward the GOP. At this point, most of the people who had been pro-segregation Democrats (Dixiecrats) became Republicans. So it was Conservative Southern Democrats who were transformed into Republicans--they didn't shed their racism when they moved from the D column to the R column. The Republican party would like people to forget that Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott and Haley Barbour were ALL--to a man--pro-segregation Democrats who became embittered pro-segregation Republicans. One unintended consequence was the shift of the two parties---the Democratic party moved Left and the Republican party moved Right. Although, to be honest, the Republican party moved more to the Right than the Democratic party moved to the Left.

3) Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Adams, Franklin and Madison were all what we would now consider to be evangelical Christians. They were not. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Madison were all deists. Paine was an atheist. Not a SINGLE one of those men would pass muster as a Christian the way that is defined within the Religious Right, the Tea Party or the Republican party.

The list could go on and on but those are three particularly pernicious myths that the Republican party is trying to perpetuate and are hoping that Americans overall cultural amnesia will allow them to get away with the bait and switch.

Cheers
Aj

So much misinformation along the political front. Number 3 is so very telling in terms of the wing-nut wagons of far right Christian folks...

Something that always bugs me is the modern day concept of what puritans were really like.... OMG!! Talk about fact distortion for one's own agenda!!

Thanks for these points, Aj. When will ever learn to reseach matters and not just accept some media blitz!!

I don't really have a problem with disagreement unless whoever is disagreeing just has not done any homework. The whole revision of facts is getting very scary... look at Texas and the proposals for US History taught in the public schools!

[Toughy]

........Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) being the first who comes to my mind.

I need to correct this. Senator Sanders is not a member of the Democratic Party, nor is he a Republican. He is an independent....meaning he has no party affiliation.

[MsDemeanor]

I need to correct this. Senator Sanders is not a member of the Democratic Party, nor is he a Republican. He is an independent....meaning he has no party affiliation.
However, he does caucus with the Democratic Party and is considered a Democrat when it comes to committee assignments.

[Glenn]

osition (always bad, we're always up to no good when we're involved in a war) and the Conservative position (kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out--as long as I don't have to do the fighting).

On the other hand, there is a *legitimate* national and transnational interest in maintaining a naval presence in the Persian Gulf. Why? Because huge amounts of the oil used by EVERY country flows through that area and everyone--from you and I to every person who could lay their hands on a boat and some explosives--knows it. In order to keep oil prices somewhere in a region that could be called stable world markets have to have a reasonable surety that the oil will get from A to B without being blown up. To do that, you need a deep water navy. We have the best blue water navy on the planet--in fact, we have the only navy that is probably capable of making certain that the oil tankers get from point A to B. It is in the global interest for oil prices to be stable and it is in the US national interest for this to be so as well.

Now, we could wish that our civilization was not dependent upon fossil fuels and I think we should not be dependent upon them. We might wish that it didn't take a deep water navy to secure the shipping lanes. But wishing doesn't make it so. The job has to be done, the US Navy can control any large body of water and the air space above it for a few hundred miles at the time and place of their choosing. Therefore the US Navy is best positioned for the job. (As an aside, this is a legacy of both WW II where sea power was decisive and the US/NATO war plan for WW III which would be fought in Europe against the Soviets. The war plan called for the army in Europe to fight the world's greatest holding action while the navy owned the Atlantic ocean and then a huge resupply mission would be undertaken. The Russians could resupply by train, the Americans had to resupply by ship.)

s MsD pointed out, national leaders--not ours, not anyone's--spends blood and treasure to fight a war because they are in the mood. They do it because they *want* something.

We're sitting on that oil there and we're not going anywhere. Why? Because of the power of fear at what could happen if we did'nt have it. A shortage of fuel eventually stopped the Germans and Japanese. Everyone needs oil to defend their countries, until Science can develop new innovative technologies we need. If oil were gone, our American spirit of pride in innovation leadership would be gone and we would need to devolve into relying upon more primitive techniques once again to get what we want. Until then ,we need our brains are so battered in by war and world devastation that every country in the world will fall upon an aggressor.

[Sabine Gallais]

:seeingstars:

The truth is that both sides equally have folks bent over. That ain't no conservative conspiracy, folks. How about we all make a deal. Let’s just call it as we see it. It’s a goddamned disaster – politics, that is. It’s one miserable failure after another, and yet the same old clowns have the unmitigated gall to get up before mankind and profess their really honest desire to do something about the raping and pillaging of America this time. Oh yes, just trust them this time and you’ll see. This time it’ll be better. The vote coming up in November isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. It’s about throwing all these criminals out on their ass for good. Every one of them. Lying, stealing, thieving bastards that they are.

So, go ahead. Enjoy your summer. Let the media continue to tell you what all this discomfort is about. Let them jerk you around as before, telling you bullsh*t about how this one over here is going to do this for you and that one over there is going to do that for you. And blah, blah, blah. Frankly, I am not going to watch this crap on TV any more until right before this election in November in order to confirm my suspicions that people fall for this nonsense over and over and over. You have to keep in mind, these people in the media are able to basically package turds and sell it to y'all. It happens all the damn time. Just read the endlessly pedantic posts.

If you want to take Rolling Stone seriously, rock on. They fly Matt Taibbi around to attend political conferences and make snide remarks and that passes for cutting edge. That rag hasn't been relevant or taken a real chance since I was taking bong hits in high school. Hmmm, is it their opinion-filled lack of journalism, their grade school writing or their biased music critiques? Maybe it's The Jonas Brothers cover? :blink: It's amazing that something supposedly so cool and supposedly subversive could be so undeniably insignificant.

:cigar2:

[dreadgeek]

:seeingstars:

[FONT="Comic Sans MS"]The truth is that both sides equally have folks bent over. That ain't no conservative conspiracy, folks. How about we all make a deal. Let’s just call it as we see it. It’s a goddamned disaster – politics, that is. It’s one miserable failure after another, and yet the same old clowns have the unmitigated gall to get up before mankind and profess their really honest desire to do something about the raping and pillaging of America this time. Oh yes, just trust them this time and you’ll see. This time it’ll be better. The vote coming up in November isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. It’s about throwing all these criminals out on their ass for good. Every one of them. Lying, stealing, thieving bastards that they are.

A couple of questions. Firstly, if all politics is a disaster what do you replace politics *with*? America is a nation of 300 million people who do not have identical interests. There are close to 7 billion people on the planet who also have interests that are far from identical with any other given person. If there is a *better* way to manage the conflicting interests of that many people beyond some kind of political process, I'm all ears. Secondly, let's say we throw them all out--every last politician currently holding office and up for election is gone. Now what? Most of the people running for office have held some other elected office so that makes them a politician which, in what we will for the moment call your analysis, means that they are lying, stealing thieving bastards. So we can't vote for the incumbent because that person is a lying bastard and we can't vote for the challenger (unless they are a neophyte) because THEY are also lying bastards. So who, precisely, is left to vote for? Write in candidates?


So, go ahead. Enjoy your summer. Let the media continue to tell you what all this discomfort is about.

Funny thing is, one can be informed by taking in a variety of media sources and then filtering it through some kind of rational thought.


Let them jerk you around as before, telling you bullsh*t about how this one over here is going to do this for you and that one over there is going to do that for you.

I don't know about you but I don't expect anyone to 'do things for me', I expect elected officials to solve problems that are too large for any one person to solve themselves. For example, I have neither the means nor the skills to build a road but my local government does. I don't have the means or skills to negotiate international treaties, but my national government does. That's not 'doing things for me', that's doing things for the country that no one individual can take on by themselves.


And blah, blah, blah. Frankly, I am not going to watch this crap on TV any more until right before this election in November in order to confirm my suspicions that people fall for this nonsense over and over and over.

So, in other words, you have already concluded what will happen and any evidence you see will be taken as evidence ONLY of your foregone conclusion.


You have to keep in mind, these people in the media are able to basically package turds and sell it to y'all. It happens all the damn time. Just read the endlessly pedantic posts.

There are media people here? Who? Who here works in the media because I wasn't aware of anyone here doing so. Or are you folding BFP into the larger category of 'the media'?

You know, the easiest thing in the world is to take a flamethrower and just indiscriminately wave it around, shouting like some biblical prophet of old that it's all corrupt, all is lost and all are fools--except those who, of course, agree with you. It is quite a bit more difficult to actually come up with a cogent argument that actually deals with complexity on its own terms while, at the same time, breaking it down into digestible pieces. Your statements may or may not be accurate--there's really no way to evaluate them because they are largely content-less. By this I mean, for example "it's a goddamned disaster--politics, that is". Okay, so what? Maybe that's true but since the statement just sits there with not even the least suggestion as to how it could be made better or what politics could be replaced with, it comes off as nothing so much as a tantrum instead of an attempt to inform or get people to think about a subject deeply.

For my money, I will trust a news organization like the BBC or NPR or even The Economist (although I don't agree with about half of what I read there) over the likes of Alex Jones or any other conspiracy theorist who is "just telling the truth". The BBC, NPR and The Economist actually have something to lose because if they get it completely wrong too many times without correction eventually they lose all credibility. Alex Jones or any other conspiracy theorist you care to mention doesn't have to worry about credibility. If PrisonPlanet announced that a giant rock will hit the Earth tomorrow at 7:00 am Pacific time and at 9:00 am there still isn't a rock the people who buy into the conspiracy theories peddled there will simply pretend that the prediction wasn't made--OR that 'the government' moved the rock out of its path with lasers as part of a secret plot to hasten the coming of the One World Government--OR that when it was said Saturday 26 June 2010 at 7:00 am Pacific it meant a DIFFERENT Saturday on a *different* 26 June 2010. What they won't admit is "they got it wrong".

[dreadgeek]

We're sitting on that oil there and we're not going anywhere. Why? Because of the power of fear at what could happen if we did'nt have it. A shortage of fuel eventually stopped the Germans and Japanese. Everyone needs oil to defend their countries, until Science can develop new innovative technologies we need. If oil were gone, our American spirit of pride in innovation leadership would be gone and we would need to devolve into relying upon more primitive techniques once again to get what we want. Until then ,we need our brains are so battered in by war and world devastation that every country in the world will fall upon an aggressor.

Imagine that oil could not get out of the Persian Gulf starting today. What would be the consequences? The first is that the non-gulf oil producers would be on their way to becoming fantastically rich because the price of oil would shoot up like the space shuttle. The second thing that would happen is that the price of food would rocket up in a desperate attempt to catch up to the price of oil. The third thing that would happen is that agriculture would grind to a halt. We use oil to make fertilizer (I won't get into the process here because it's not germane) so suddenly we would be doing agriculture as it was done in the early part of the 19th century before we could make nitrogen fertilizers. The fourth thing that would happen is that industry would grind to a halt as other fuel couldn’t' get from A to B, materials couldn't get from A to B, and some things couldn't be manufactured at all.

So now we have six billion people many of them hungry and living in gigantic monkey-hives called cities which are going to go dark as soon as the sun sets. Hellish nightmare straight out of Dante doesn't even *begin* to touch how horrible this gets. I'm not talking about what would happen just to the U.S. but this would be global.

It is simply a fact that we cannot feed 6 billion people on pre-20th century agricultural techniques. Not possible. It is simply a fact that modern medicine relies heavily on plastics which are made from, you guessed it, oil. It is simply a fact that it takes oil to get coal or wood or anything else you might use for fuel from here to there. World civilization would collapse. That's not trading in fear, that's trading in cold-eyed reality.

Yes, a shortage of fuel sort-of stopped the Germans (although I would argue that Germany was just battered into submission). The Japanese probably could have kept fighting--had two atomic bombs not been dropped on their cities. Recognizing that the Americans had a weapon they could not counter and which would visit unspeakable horror upon their people if they kept on, they surrendered. But your point demonstrates just how important oil is to modern society. I don't know about you but I am profoundly grateful I wasn't born in the dark ages and I would like very much for human civilization to avoid a repeat performance of them.

[Sabine Gallais]

Of course, the MSM wants you to believe that there is a power struggle going on in the military over Afghanistan (=distraction), and the new big whopping financial industry regulations that those poor bastards worked on all night long for us small people (=another distraction), and the big hamburger outing with Medvedev after his visit to ‘Twitters’ (=distraction), and on and on and on it goes seemingly without end…

:dance2:

[MsDemeanor]

You know, the easiest thing in the world is to take a flamethrower and just indiscriminately wave it around, shouting like some biblical prophet of old that it's all corrupt, all is lost and all are fools--except those who, of course, agree with you.
I really should copy this quote and paste it every time someone posts one of those nonsensical 'everyone's corrupt', 'throw the bastards out', 'there's no difference', or, then new one, 'everything's a distraction'. It's become clear to me that one of the biggest problems facing this country isn't our government, it's our citizenry, where a fair number of people don't bother to pay attention, to get facts, to sort out the crap, and to make informed decisions.

My new rule: If you make blanket statements about government, politicians, or policy along the line of 'it's all bad', I'm going assume that you don't pay attention and you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

[MsDemeanor]

Of course, the MSM wants you to believe that there is a power struggle going on in the military over Afghanistan (=distraction), and the new big whopping financial industry regulations that those poor bastards worked on all night long for us small people (=another distraction), and the big hamburger outing with Medvedev after his visit to ‘Twitters’ (=distraction), and on and on and on it goes seemingly without end…


Um, there IS disagreement over Afghanistan. There IS financial overhaul - though it's much less powerful and effective than it should be thanks to the Republicans (once again, if one can't tell the difference between the parties, one is not paying attention). And they DID eat a hamburger and discuss twitter. None of this is made up by the MSM, it really is happening!! There's really also an oil spill, and global warming, and all kinds of stuff. The MSM doesn't fabricate disasters and wars to generate advertising revenue.

[SuperFemme]

Um, there IS disagreement over Afghanistan. There IS financial overhaul - though it's much less powerful and effective than it should be thanks to the Republicans (once again, if one can't tell the difference between the parties, one is not paying attention). And they DID eat a hamburger and discuss twitter. None of this is made up by the MSM, it really is happening!! There's really also an oil spill, and global warming, and all kinds of stuff. The MSM doesn't fabricate disasters and wars to generate advertising revenue.

Right? The distraction argument reminds me of the groups that say the holocaust never happened. Meaning the distraction argument is a distraction in and of itself.

[dreadgeek]

It's become clear to me that one of the biggest problems facing this country isn't our government, it's our citizenry, where a fair number of people don't bother to pay attention, to get facts, to sort out the crap, and to make informed decisions.

My new rule: If you make blanket statements about government, politicians, or policy along the line of 'it's all bad', I'm going assume that you don't pay attention and you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

I have to say that I want to copy that out and paste it in every time someone starts complaining about how all the politicians are corrupt. We may not have the government we want but increasingly I am coming to the conclusion that we have the government we deserve. We deserve it because we no longer think that there's any difference between information and rumour, fact or fiction. If you believe that a solar flare is going to turn the Earth upside down like in some summer blockbuster movie, it isn't really going to matter what any scientist says about it being physically impossible. It's not going to matter how much information they bring to bear on debunking the idea. The Earth is going to be turned upside down by a solar flare, killing off all but the very rich (for no good reason), and 'the government' is keeping it all from us. Full-stop, end of story.

That might sound funny but that's precisely where we find ourselves in this country today. A high ranking officer is insubordinate and gets cashiered (much to the delight of the troops under his command) and it's a distraction? No, not really. If firing McChrystal means that someone who is less likely to get my son killed will take command in the Afghani theatre then I'm all for it and I don't consider it a distraction at all. It IS news that McChrystal was fired. It's easy to say "it's a distraction" but I couldn't help but notice that it was never detailed *what* we were being distracted *from*. If I'm doing a "hey, look over there!" feint then I'm not doing it because it's Thursday and I can has cheeseburger, it's because I want your attention elsewhere while I do something. Well, what's that thing that we're being distracted from? Or is the MSM just distracting us because it's Friday and they can has cheeseburger?

You're spot on that so many citizens don't pay attention and don't filter things through a fine mesh of "is it reasonable to presume that the world works this way". That fine mesh alone makes it safe to get news from a variety of sources. (And for the record, TV news--including Rachel Maddow's program--is not real valuable to me as anything but entertainment with two exceptions--BBC America's news broadcast and PBS Newshour. I get my news mostly by reading because I'm antiquarian like that.)

Lastly, I can't help but notice that the prophets are long on declarations of how FUBARd things are and how anyone who doesn't see that in the exact same terms they do is nothing more than a foolish dupe of the powers-that-be and their media lapdogs. When it comes to solutions, however, nine times out of ten they are nowhere to be found because solutions aren't interesting, they aren't as emotionally satisfying and they have the added disadvantage of actually forcing one to deal with the complexities of a given problem. I used to think that the world was a pretty simple place but the more I tried to understand why the world didn't work the way a simple world should, the more I realized that part of what was wrong wasn't with the world but with my expectations of it. I was expecting a very complicated world to behave as a very simple system. The more I delve into a given subject, the more I have come to realize that the problems facing us are fiendishly difficult.

Just to take one--our dependency on fossil fuels. We need to get off oil and coal as soon as possible. Yet, getting off oil--particularly--isn't going to be easy. Sure, we could all trade in our ICE cars for hybrids or, better yet, electric cars. But I don't think that an electric 18-wheeler is practical and an electric jumbo jet is out of the question. The easy answer is "no more oil!". Nice, simple, fits on a bumper sticker and is emotionally satisfying. But spending time with the issue, trying to figure out how we still manage to have an economy while not using fossil fuels anymore than is absolutely necessary will make your head hurt. It doesn't fit on a bumper sticker. "No more oil! (Except for long haul transport, military applications and jet aircraft)" doesn't really fit on a bumper sticker very well.

I don't pretend to have answers for what ails us. I do hope that I think about these issues and give them the gravity and respect of depth that the problems deserve and require. I hope that when I get didactic here I am stimulating people to think about matters in a way that, perhaps, they didn't think about them before. This is our mess--not 'the government's mess' it's OUR mess. Like I said earlier, we may not have the government we want but we probably have the government we deserve.

Cheers
Aj

[AtLast]

Right? The distraction argument reminds me of the groups that say the holocaust never happened. Meaning the distraction argument is a distraction in and of itself.

Touche! Isn't it amazing?!!!

[Andrew, Jr.]

Has anyone heard about the weather system involved with the BP Oil Leak? I just shutter to think what is going to happen if a tropical storm hits any of the oil. This breaks my heart.

[dreadgeek]

Um, there IS disagreement over Afghanistan. There IS financial overhaul - though it's much less powerful and effective than it should be thanks to the Republicans (once again, if one can't tell the difference between the parties, one is not paying attention). And they DID eat a hamburger and discuss twitter. None of this is made up by the MSM, it really is happening!! There's really also an oil spill, and global warming, and all kinds of stuff. The MSM doesn't fabricate disasters and wars to generate advertising revenue.

Now, it may be that my son is ALSO part of the MSM (or maybe I am) but he sent me the following email after I had written him asking what he and his buddies thought about McChrystal being relieved of command:

"If we could find the guy from Rolling Stone we'd buy him all the beer he could drink! McChrystal was getting people killed and we're happy to see him gone. No one here can figure out why the guy was put in charge of this op in the first place. We'd much rather have Petraeus calling the shots than McChrystal. At least we know that Petraeus knows his ass from a hole in the ground."

There's more in the email but I won't bore you with our personal correspondence.

I don't consider an active war zone where my son is getting shot at to be a distraction.

I was wondering about the whole 'distraction' too. Okay, Obama and Medvedev having a burger and the latter visiting 'Twitters' is a shaggy dog story but it's not as if it was fabricated. A general getting fired is certainly dog bites man, not man bites dog. And the financial reform certainly shows that the Democrats still don't *quite* get it but it's better than what happened with the extension of unemployment benefits.

I would really, really like to know what is it we're supposed to be distracted from with all this talk of wars, oil spills, climate change, etc.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Has anyone heard about the weather system involved with the BP Oil Leak? I just shutter to think what is going to happen if a tropical storm hits any of the oil. This breaks my heart.

What weather system involved with the BP oil leak? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that there was a storm that was a (partial) cause of the oil leak or are you saying that the oil has created a weather system? I don't know exactly what you mean.

[Andrew, Jr.]

There is a tropical storm in the Caribbean. It may make it to where the BP leak is at. I am not sure of who is running the show there now - The Coast Guard or BP or Fed. Gov't. What happens if a tropical storm hits it?

[Rufusboi]

What weather system involved with the BP oil leak? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that there was a storm that was a (partial) cause of the oil leak or are you saying that the oil has created a weather system? I don't know exactly what you mean.

Dread - I believe what Andrew is refering to is a tropical storm developing around Yucatan. The Weather Channel has been giving updates every hour for the last 2 days. The concern is if the depression develops into a tropical storm or upgrades to a hurricane it would be a devistating mess to the coastline due to the oil spillage.

Rufus

[MsDemeanor]

What weather system involved with the BP oil leak? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that there was a storm that was a (partial) cause of the oil leak or are you saying that the oil has created a weather system? I don't know exactly what you mean.
There's a storm developing south of Jamaica that could become a tropical depression or storm and then might move up in to the gulf. It's too early to tell what it will be or where it will go - north to the gulf or west to Mexico.

[Corkey]

There is a tropical storm in the Caribbean. It may make it to where the BP leak is at. I am not sure of who is running the show there now - The Coast Guard or BP or Fed. Gov't. What happens if a tropical storm hits it?

Andrew, the feds aren't running the show, BP has yet to cap the leak therefore any weather system that hits the area is going to make a total mess of the coast line and destroy even more of the eco system. They have 2 ships syphoning the oil, and they would have to leave the area if the storms were to hit. It's not up to the feds to clean it up it is BP's responsibility. The feds are there to make sure they do, but the feds don't have any technology to do this, i.e.: the Navy, or Coast Guard.

[dreadgeek]

Ahh! Thank you! I hadn't paid much attention to the weather in the last few days. I have a program called EarthDesk (http://www.xericdesign.com/earthdesk.php) that shows you a map of the Earth (in whatever projection you like) as your desktop background with near-real-time satellite updates of cloud patterns so it's actually rather useful for tracking storms. I usually run it during hurricane season and had forgotten to turn it on. Thanks all for explaining and reminding me to run it so I can keep track of what this storm is doing.



There's a storm developing south of Jamaica that could become a tropical depression or storm and then might move up in to the gulf. It's too early to tell what it will be or where it will go - north to the gulf or west to Mexico.

Dread - I believe what Andrew is refering to is a tropical storm developing around Yucatan. The Weather Channel has been giving updates every hour for the last 2 days. The concern is if the depression develops into a tropical storm or upgrades to a hurricane it would be a devistating mess to the coastline due to the oil spillage.

Rufus

There is a tropical storm in the Caribbean. It may make it to where the BP leak is at. I am not sure of who is running the show there now - The Coast Guard or BP or Fed. Gov't. What happens if a tropical storm hits it?

[dreadgeek]

With all the talk of late of how the mainstream media just wants to distract us and my own criticism of just throwing flames of the 'all politicians are thugs throw 'em all to the wolves' I thought it might be helpful to post an example of critique of our political system that is useful. I'm not a Dylan Ratigan fan which, ironically, is why I chose this piece of his (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dylan-ratigan/politicians-lie-media-app_b_625885.html).

Here's the flames--right up front:

The same Washington spinsters who have driven our country into the ground seem to be out in full force this morning, claiming that their latest policy "victory" is the most "sweeping change" of our financial regulatory since the Great Depression.

Actually, it is nothing more than window dressing.

But he doesn't just call them spinsters and leave it at that.

Meanwhile, all involved in the facade try to pretend that this should be considered a success because, gosh, real financial reform is just too hard and those crafty banksters will just outsmart us anyhow. Many in the media are either too complicit, too confused or too lazy to contradict this spin, but the rest of us shouldn't buy that BS. Real and lasting financial reform is actually quite easy to implement -- and the last time we had a crisis of this magnitude, we kept the banksters in check for 70 years.

Here there's a least the hint of solutions. My problem isn't with critiques, my problem is with critiques that are reactionary, fact-free or fact-poor and don't even suggest that the problem might be solvable, even in principle.

Cheers
Aj

[AtLast]

I have to say that I want to copy that out and paste it in every time someone starts complaining about how all the politicians are corrupt. We may not have the government we want but increasingly I am coming to the conclusion that we have the government we deserve. We deserve it because we no longer think that there's any difference between information and rumour, fact or fiction. If you believe that a solar flare is going to turn the Earth upside down like in some summer blockbuster movie, it isn't really going to matter what any scientist says about it being physically impossible. It's not going to matter how much information they bring to bear on debunking the idea. The Earth is going to be turned upside down by a solar flare, killing off all but the very rich (for no good reason), and 'the government' is keeping it all from us. Full-stop, end of story.

That might sound funny but that's precisely where we find ourselves in this country today. A high ranking officer is insubordinate and gets cashiered (much to the delight of the troops under his command) and it's a distraction? No, not really. If firing McChrystal means that someone who is less likely to get my son killed will take command in the Afghani theatre then I'm all for it and I don't consider it a distraction at all. It IS news that McChrystal was fired. It's easy to say "it's a distraction" but I couldn't help but notice that it was never detailed *what* we were being distracted *from*. If I'm doing a "hey, look over there!" feint then I'm not doing it because it's Thursday and I can has cheeseburger, it's because I want your attention elsewhere while I do something. Well, what's that thing that we're being distracted from? Or is the MSM just distracting us because it's Friday and they can has cheeseburger?

You're spot on that so many citizens don't pay attention and don't filter things through a fine mesh of "is it reasonable to presume that the world works this way". That fine mesh alone makes it safe to get news from a variety of sources. (And for the record, TV news--including Rachel Maddow's program--is not real valuable to me as anything but entertainment with two exceptions--BBC America's news broadcast and PBS Newshour. I get my news mostly by reading because I'm antiquarian like that.)

Lastly, I can't help but notice that the prophets are long on declarations of how FUBARd things are and how anyone who doesn't see that in the exact same terms they do is nothing more than a foolish dupe of the powers-that-be and their media lapdogs. When it comes to solutions, however, nine times out of ten they are nowhere to be found because solutions aren't interesting, they aren't as emotionally satisfying and they have the added disadvantage of actually forcing one to deal with the complexities of a given problem. I used to think that the world was a pretty simple place but the more I tried to understand why the world didn't work the way a simple world should, the more I realized that part of what was wrong wasn't with the world but with my expectations of it. I was expecting a very complicated world to behave as a very simple system. The more I delve into a given subject, the more I have come to realize that the problems facing us are fiendishly difficult.

Just to take one--our dependency on fossil fuels. We need to get off oil and coal as soon as possible. Yet, getting off oil--particularly--isn't going to be easy. Sure, we could all trade in our ICE cars for hybrids or, better yet, electric cars. But I don't think that an electric 18-wheeler is practical and an electric jumbo jet is out of the question. The easy answer is "no more oil!". Nice, simple, fits on a bumper sticker and is emotionally satisfying. But spending time with the issue, trying to figure out how we still manage to have an economy while not using fossil fuels anymore than is absolutely necessary will make your head hurt. It doesn't fit on a bumper sticker. "No more oil! (Except for long haul transport, military applications and jet aircraft)" doesn't really fit on a bumper sticker very well.

I don't pretend to have answers for what ails us. I do hope that I think about these issues and give them the gravity and respect of depth that the problems deserve and require. I hope that when I get didactic here I am stimulating people to think about matters in a way that, perhaps, they didn't think about them before. This is our mess--not 'the government's mess' it's OUR mess. Like I said earlier, we may not have the government we want but we probably have the government we deserve.

Cheers
Aj

Yes, OUR mess! And well deserved at times! So tired of talking point, bumper sticker, Wiki blurb quick-click research and just thinking like your best friend political unconsciousness. Frankly, I would rather have less less uninformed voters voting. And most certainly less knee-jerk voters going to the polls. And don't even get me started on the lack of motivation to give a few hours a month to issues and causes effecting our everyday lives. I often think that most people in the US are just fine with the Congressional deadlock we have.. they would rather take pot shots than take responsibility for what our elected officials do.

I know I can always do more, read more, even care more and if things remain disfunctional, I better be willing to take some personal blame if I'm doing nothing but sitting on my ass, bitching. My stances may not be what ends up being adopted, but, I am part of a conscious effort to effect change.

[Toughy]

Vietnam wasn't about resources?

Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United States did a study that showed that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China, now known as Vietnam.

We were in Vietnam to protect Standard Oil's assets— McCarthy's notions did a very good job of distracting folks from that reality.

I would not call the reserves off the coast of Vietnam as one of the largest in the world. It's not even in the top 25. Lots of countries have much larger oil reserves. I don't buy that oil was the reason for Nam.

http://world.bymap.org/OilReserves.html

http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/oilreserves

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_res-energy-oil-reserves (this one ranks Nam as number 41)

[dreadgeek]

Yes, OUR mess! And well deserved at times! So tired of talking point, bumper sticker, Wiki blurb quick-click research and just thinking like your best friend political unconsciousness. Frankly, I would rather have less less uninformed voters voting. And most certainly less knee-jerk voters going to the polls. And don't even get me started on the lack of motivation to give a few hours a month to issues and causes effecting our everyday lives. I often think that most people in the US are just fine with the Congressional deadlock we have.. they would rather take pot shots than take responsibility for what our elected officials do.

I know I can always do more, read more, even care more and if things remain disfunctional, I better be willing to take some personal blame if I'm doing nothing but sitting on my ass, bitching. My stances may not be what ends up being adopted, but, I am part of a conscious effort to effect change.

In Susan Jacoby's book "The Age of American Unreason" she relates an incident that I think is a poignant picture of who we once were in this country. I don't have the book with me at work so I cannot give you a verbatim quote but I'll relate it as best I can. FDR was going to give a fireside chat on the war, so this was probably early 1942 or so, and announced the week before that he would be talking about the Pacific Theatre of operations and urged people to go and buy maps. Across this country maps *sold out*. People then gathered around the radio, map spread out on the kitchen table or the living room floor and listened to FDR talk about what was happening in the Pacific.

Several things immediately leap to mind as to what we have lost. Firstly, an American President talked to the American people as if they could understand the complexities of the Pacific war. He wasn't talking specific tactics or actions planned. Just laying out the stakes. Secondly, the American people actually went out and bought maps so they could follow along and understand what was being said. Instead of deciding that it was too much work, or accusing Roosevelt of being just like Stalin, they went and bought maps and assumed that they too could understand what was happening. I'm not talking policy wonks, I'm talking people like my mother (18 in 1941) and my grandmother (35 with nothing more than a 4th grade education *maybe*). Farmers and mechanics, housewives, teachers and street sweepers assumed that they too could look on a map and evaluate what the President was saying. Their country was at war, the least they could do was know where and why.

Can you imagine an American President--ANY American President--asking the American people to go and buy maps or download the CIA World Factbook (and if you don't already have it bookmarked then do so--it's a great resource for anything you want to know about a country that is quantifiable and/or empirical)? Can you imagine the hew and cry that would be raised? Can you imagine what would happen if the President were to give a radio or TV address where he asked people to listen with their map at hand? I can hear it right now. All over FOX the President would be accused of elitism, of being out of touch with ordinary Americans, of having his nose stuck in the air(provided the POTUS was a Democrat). How many people do you know who would go to Google, download Google Earth (free) or go to the CIA and download the Factbook (free and takes up about 150 MB unzipped)? How many would actually bother to listen and follow along?

I don't know what happened to us but once upon a time, in my parents (and for most of you reading this your grandparent's) time we really *were* these people. We actually behaved this way. Now, we could say that we lost it because we became a more diverse society but I don't buy that. We could blame TV--but again, I don't really buy that one although it's a little more plausible. Ultimately, I think we just became a culture that is lazy and in becoming so lazy we lost confidence in ourselves. Not the 'USA! USA!' confidence which isn't confidence but is braggadocio. Rather, I mean the confidence that it took to say "well, I'm not a college graduate but I can read a map, I have ears and eyes and I can follow this". THAT kind of confidence.

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, from the Revolutionary period. After the Constitutional Convention, Franklin was asked what kind of government they had created. He responded "A Republic, if you can keep it". Notice that he didn't say "if the government can keep it" or "if the media can keep it" but if YOU--a citizen--can keep it. He was speaking to a man of his own time but he was also speaking to us in our time. This Republic does not belong to JP Morgan Chase or Goldman-Sachs. It doesn't belong to Rupert Murdoch or Roger Aisles. It belongs to you, to me, to all 300 million of us each individually.

Yes, the Founders were all heterosexual, white men about half of whom were slaveholders and almost all of whom had very unflattering things to say about blacks and women and others. So what? They are dead and their bones are dust so it doesn't really matter. Yes, the Constitution was flawed and is still less than perfect. Find me one thing that humans have built that was perfect. This is our country, OUR Republic. The Founders bet that an educated and informed populace could keep a Republic going. I see no reason to doubt that this is true. The problem we face is that our public is no longer educated or informed and many do not want to be, preferring the quick fix of emotionally satisfying jingoism or pseudo-cynicism (which is really high idealism masquerading as cynicism).

This is our mess. If any bums need to be thrown out, it's us. We let it come to this.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

I would not call the reserves off the coast of Vietnam as one of the largest in the world. It's not even in the top 25. Lots of countries have much larger oil reserves. I don't buy that oil was the reason for Nam.

http://world.bymap.org/OilReserves.html

http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/oilreserves

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_res-energy-oil-reserves (this one ranks Nam as number 41)

I can't buy it either, Toughy. Remember, at the time that the Vietnam war was going on the United States was in the Top 10 producers of oil in the world. We had large fields in California, Texas and Pennsylvania. I believe--if memory serves--that until just about the end of the Vietnam war we were a net *exporter* of oil. So I can't see any reason why we would go to war in Vietnam over oil. It would be akin to Saudi Arabia, the number one exporter of oil, going to war against Denmark over oil. Is that something that Saudi Arabia was likely to do? No. I'm not even sure that the French knew that there was oil off the coast of Vietnam--although I might be mistaken there.

Cheers
Aj

[Toughy]

That little weather system in the Caribbean could actually make things better on the coastlines, depending on the direction it takes. It also could make it worse.

It's just too early to tell where it's going or what it's going to do or how strong it might become.

[dreadgeek]

Earlier today I posted about an anecdote in Susan Jacoby's book "The Age of American Unreason" regarding FDR and one of his fireside chats. I got one or two facts wrong and Jacoby's telling is far more poignant than my writing skills can convey. So here it is, if you sit and think about this, really think about it, you'll start to see what we've lost and how we've let our country--that is to say ourselves--down.

Roosevelt's first fireside chat after Pearl Harbor came in February 1942, and he had asked Americans to spread out a map during his radio address so that they could follow and comprehend the geography of battle. The New York Times quoted one E. O. Schmidt, sales manager of a Manhattan bookstore, about the public response to the president's request. Schmidt had rounded up 2,000 copies of a new atlas to meet the demand, and, by the the night of the fireside chat, every map had been sold. Roosevelt told his listeners--who included 80 percent of all American adults--that he had asked them to use maps so that they might better understand a war being waged, unlike previous wars, on "every continent, every island, every sea, every airline in the world." In explaining the strategic situation to the public, Roosevelt was able to draw on his own extensive knowledge of geography, acquired early in life through his well-known hobby of stamp collecting. He had told his speechwriters that he was certain if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies must travel to the armed forces, "if they understand the problem and what we are driving at, I am sure they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but of different Americans, without access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but with a much greater receptivity to learning than today's public.
(Susan Jacoby--The Age of American Unreason)

But it's more poignant even than that. In 1940, only about a quarter of all American men and women had even graduated high school. The numbers for college graduates were both under 10%. That means that around 70% of all Americans had less than a high school diploma and still they behaved like this. We're not talking a population of intellectuals. Now, the overwhelming majority of Americans graduate high school and about a third of all Americans have a college degree. And yet, more than half of us couldn't tell you which coast of the continent borders the Pacific ocean and which borders the Atlantic. A nation of people who hadn't graduated high school thought it important to know where Germany, Japan and Italy were. A nation of high school graduates could care less to know and would look down their nose and call elitist--or worse--any person who did care to know.

That's what we've lost. I was raised by people who grew up in that America, who remembered what it was like. They taught me that as a black woman in America it was my *job* to be informed and to think deeply on the issues of the day, if for no better reason than so I could vote well and explain things to my children. I don't want America to turn into a bunch of policy wonks (okay, I wouldn't shed any tears if we did but I don't expect it to happen). I would like for America to get whatever it was we had in 1942 that we don't have now back. If we can't get it back (and who knows if we can but I doubt it) then at least let us know what it is we let go.

Those Americans--who did not protect the voting rights of blacks in all the states and the women in the population had only been voting for two decades--demanded a president who solved problems and talked to them like they were grown ups. They demanded it and they got it because they *deserved* it and would settle for nothing less. We want a president who--I don't even know if WE know what we want but whatever it is, talking to us like we're grown ups and assuming that we could take bad news certainly aren't high on the list of they are present at all. They got the government they deserved in 1942. We have, I suspect, the government that we deserve--not the one we need--in 2010.

Cheers
Aj


Cheers
Aj

[AtLast]

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but of different Americans, without access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but with a much greater receptivity to learning than today's public.[/I]
(Susan Jacoby--The Age of American Unreason)

But it's more poignant even than that. In 1940, only about a quarter of all American men and women had even graduated high school. The numbers for college graduates were both under 10%. That means that around 70% of all Americans had less than a high school diploma and still they behaved like this. We're not talking a population of intellectuals. Now, the overwhelming majority of Americans graduate high school and about a third of all Americans have a college degree. And yet, more than half of us couldn't tell you which coast of the continent borders the Pacific ocean and which borders the Atlantic. A nation of people who hadn't graduated high school thought it important to know where Germany, Japan and Italy were. A nation of high school graduates could care less to know and would look down their nose and call elitist--or worse--any person who did care to know.

That's what we've lost. I was raised by people who grew up in that America, who remembered what it was like. They taught me that as a black woman in America it was my *job* to be informed and to think deeply on the issues of the day, if for no better reason than so I could vote well and explain things to my children. I don't want America to turn into a bunch of policy wonks (okay, I wouldn't shed any tears if we did but I don't expect it to happen). I would like for America to get whatever it was we had in 1942 that we don't have now back. If we can't get it back (and who knows if we can but I doubt it) then at least let us know what it is we let go.

Those Americans--who did not protect the voting rights of blacks in all the states and the women in the population had only been voting for two decades--demanded a president who solved problems and talked to them like they were grown ups. They demanded it and they got it because they *deserved* it and would settle for nothing less. We want a president who--I don't even know if WE know what we want but whatever it is, talking to us like we're grown ups and assuming that we could take bad news certainly aren't high on the list of they are present at all. They got the government they deserved in 1942. We have, I suspect, the government that we deserve--not the one we need--in 2010.

Cheers
Aj


Cheers
Aj

Strikes deep chords for me as well. Very deep.

[Rufusboi]

Can you imagine an American President--ANY American President--asking the American people to go and buy maps or download the CIA World Factbook (and if you don't already have it bookmarked then do so--it's a great resource for anything you want to know about a country that is quantifiable and/or empirical)? Can you imagine the hew and cry that would be raised? Can you imagine what would happen if the President were to give a radio or TV address where he asked people to listen with their map at hand? I can hear it right now. All over FOX the President would be accused of elitism, of being out of touch with ordinary Americans, of having his nose stuck in the air(provided the POTUS was a Democrat). How many people do you know who would go to Google, download Google Earth (free) or go to the CIA and download the Factbook (free and takes up about 150 MB unzipped)? How many would actually bother to listen and follow along?

Aj


Actually, I think a lot of us would welcome that. I think that you are assuming a lot of Americans would not bother. I think a lot would bother.

I think you are underestimaing the American population. I think more Americans are tuned in, aware, and concerned than you could imagine. Google Earth is a famous and well used tool. The CIA factbook is no secret. It is well used website and research tool.

Rufus

[MsDemeanor]

I think you are underestimaing the American population. I think more Americans are tuned in, aware, and concerned than you could imagine.
Let's just pick two really basic things:

41% don't believe global warming is happening
25% don't believe in evolution, another 36% have no opinion

These are both basic science stuff - no degrees required.

Then there are folks who take Palin seriously, folks who think that deficit spending is not good for the economy right now, folks who don't think BP should pay for their mess, folks who don't understand that our economy would implode if every immigrant worker left tomorrow, etc.

We're in two wars. How many folks still think Saddam Hussein was involved with the NY attack? How many can find Afghanistan on a map? For that matter, how many can even name all 50 states? You'd be shocked at the number of folks who think New Mexico is in another country.

I try to console myself by thinking that it's the same group of people that are out of touch on all of the above issues. Sadly, it appears that they vote, since they have representatives in Congress who believe all of the above, too.

[Rufusboi]

Let's just pick two really basic things:

41% don't believe global warming is happening
25% don't believe in evolution, another 36% have no opinion

These are both basic science stuff - no degrees required.

Then there are folks who take Palin seriously, folks who think that deficit spending is not good for the economy right now, folks who don't think BP should pay for their mess, folks who don't understand that our economy would implode if every immigrant worker left tomorrow, etc.

We're in two wars. How many folks still think Saddam Hussein was involved with the NY attack? How many can find Afghanistan on a map? For that matter, how many can even name all 50 states? You'd be shocked at the number of folks who think New Mexico is in another country.

I try to console myself by thinking that it's the same group of people that are out of touch on all of the above issues. Sadly, it appears that they vote, since they have representatives in Congress who believe all of the above, too.



Not all scientists can agree if global warming is happening. Not all scientists can agree that if it is happening whether it is caused by human actions or is a natural occurence. The evolution debate is also linked to religion. Just because someone has religious beliefs that don't coincide with another person's belief in evolution does not mean they are uninformed or uneducated, it just means they have different beliefs. I'm not a fan of Palin, but some people think it is wonky thinking to take Obama seriously or Clinton seriously.

The points you are making above have to do with opinion not how informed someone is on issues or how willing they are to learn about issues. Otherwise you are saying that anyone that does not agree with you is uninformed. Surely you are not saying that?

Perhaps someone's belief that Saddam was involved in 9/11 is due to being influenced by media stories and hype. Part of the issue is that most of us don't know what to believe because most of what we read is biased and skewed, lacking facts, or poorly written. So perhaps if the President did say take out your map, here are the facts, maybe many of us would. We spend our days sorting through so much misinformation that most of us no longer know which side is up.

My larger point is not to point fingers at the masses or people who disagree with you, but to point out the problems with sources of information.

I would also add that I think most of the problem is not to do with lack of knowledge of facts and info bites, but lack of critical thinkihg and analysis. Teaching people how to think is more important than teaching them what to think.

Rufus

[SuperFemme]

fun quiz:

http://www.bbhq.com/civquiz.htm

[dreadgeek]

Not all scientists can agree if global warming is happening. Not all scientists can agree that if it is happening whether it is caused by human actions or is a natural occurence. The evolution debate is also linked to religion. Just because someone has religious beliefs that don't coincide with another person's belief in evolution does not mean they are uninformed or uneducated, it just means they have different beliefs. I'm not a fan of Palin, but some people think it is wonky thinking to take Obama seriously or Clinton seriously.

It is true that not ALL scientists agree that global warming is happening. But the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community is that global warming is happening and that the most parsimonious cause is that it is anthropogenic. It is the explanation that best fits the data. What's more, the scientists who tend to *disagree* with the consensus are not, in fact, geophysicists or climate scientists--rather they tend to come from outside the field. Lastly, some of the scientists who claim to disagree with global warming are actually engineers. With no insult meant to any engineers in the house but engineering is not science. It is based upon science but it is not science itself.

Evolution is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of scientific evidence. I know that this is going to insult some folks but there's really no kind way to put this--if you deny that evolution happened then you are manifestly and seriously misinformed about biology. That's harsh but it also has the virtue of being true. ALL of the evidence in biology is on the side of evolution and NONE of it is on the side of any other explanation which, let's be honest, is creationism. Intelligent design is just creationism disguised to pass Constitutional muster. Again, ALL of the evidence in biology is on the side of evolution and NONE of it is on the side of any other explanation. This isn't a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying to you or doesn't know the literature.

All of the genetic evidence points to common descent.
Incipient structures point to common descent.
Transitional fossils point to common descent.
That we can *reliably* calculate the distance between any two species for which we have a complete genome within a margin of error of around +/- 1% points to common descent.
The fossil record points to common descent.
Species in transition toward speciation (the northern ring gulls around the Arctic circle) point to the fact that our model of speciation appears to be correct.
The fact that certain genes code for the same thing across phylum speaks to common descent. For example, the same gene that codes 'make eyes here' in fruit flies does the same job in rats, mice, humans in fact ALL of the placental mammals use the same gene (memory slips me if the marsupials use that gene but I believe they do). This doesn't specify what KIND of eyes grow in the location it simply specifies "whatever kind of eyes are going to be built, build them here". The HOX2 gene is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom (HOX2 is one of the genes tasked with building the overall body plan.)

I could go on and on but you get the picture. Evolution is the only *reasonable*, testable explanation subject to falsification going. Might an intelligent designer have created all of it? Sure, it's *possible*. But just because something is *possible* doesn't mean it is at all reasonable to assume that it happened. The problem with intelligent design is that it can't be falsified. Intelligent design proponents avoid the subject of falsification because they *know* they don't actually care if it can be falsified or not. If it can't be falsified it's not science. It might be art, poetry, religion or drama but it isn't science. Evolutionary theory can be falsified and has withstood every single challenge thrown at it in the last 150 years. Every anomaly so far has been accounted for.

Look, if someone said that the Sun orbits the Earth every single person here would say that person is ignorant of physics. If someone said that Abraham Lincoln was never President of the United States every single person here would say that person was ignorant of U.S. history. If someone said that space and time are two separate things then anyone who knows Relativity would say that person was ignorant of the that subject. And if someone maintains that evolutionary theory is wrong then that person is demonstrating their manifest ignorance of biology. I'm sorry, I know that's harsh, but it is still true. Yes, I know that there are biology teachers who claim that they don't accept the theory of evolution--they are either lying or they got their biology degree from a Christian college that taught them lies about the science of biology. Yes, I used the term lies because they are lies. To say that there are no transitional fossils is to lie. To say that there are irreducibly complex structures is to lie.


Perhaps someone's belief that Saddam was involved in 9/11 is due to being influenced by media stories and hype.

No, it is due to not being skeptical, doing about 15 minutes worth of research on Google. It's this simple. Saddam Hussein was a Baathist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba'ath_Party). The Baathist are secular pan-Arabists and outside of using religion as a prop, take a pretty standard Jacobin Socialist line on religion--namely that it's bunk but is a tool of social control. The 9/11 hijackers were all members of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is a Wahhabi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabi)-influenced group of Sunni Muslims. To put it into American cultural context, the Baath party would be somewhat akin to the Communist Party in Stalinist Russia and Wahhabism is to Islam as Southern Baptist is to Christianity. So what you are saying, in essence, is that the militaristic arm of a fanatically devout sect of Islam--whose leader, by the way, called for the head of Saddam Hussein for being an apostate--got into bed with a secular socialist who would just as soon be done away with religion entirely. Again, to put it into context that would be like saying that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are the two top donors to the ACLU! Now, this is information that if you had read anything about the Middle East you would have known as of 9 Sep 2001. But if you hadn't it was STILL information that existed and I simply Googled and linked to the very first result returned--which turned out to be Wikipedia articles.

These are not hidden or classified sources. They are totally open sources and so if someone believes that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 or even thinks it is plausible it is because they didn't take the time to Google some terms that they were probably not familiar with before 11 Sep 2001. Terms like Wahhabi and Baath party and Sunni and pan-Arabism. If information is available--and it is--and the information is important--and it is--and someone doesn't take the time to go out and confirm for themselves that is THEIR fault, not the fault of society or the media.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Actually, I think a lot of us would welcome that. I think that you are assuming a lot of Americans would not bother. I think a lot would bother.

I think you are underestimaing the American population. I think more Americans are tuned in, aware, and concerned than you could imagine. Google Earth is a famous and well used tool. The CIA factbook is no secret. It is well used website and research tool.

Rufus

I don't think that I am, Rufus. Just to give you a couple of incidents which are, admittedly anecdotal but still agree with the evidence from pretty much every single study on the subject:

Gulf War I. I am about a year out of the military when this war jumps off. People at the office I worked at made statements like "we have to get Saddam before he can get over here". Now, there has been no 9/11 attack so no one is thinking about flying planes into buildings. They're thinking along the lines of the United States being invaded by Iraq. So I go my bud Bubba's house and get out his atlas and some tracing paper. I trace the relevant region leaving out the names of the countries. Not a *single* person could find Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel or the PERSIAN GULF on the map. I then showed them a map of the globe, pointed out where Iraq was, pointed out where the Persian Gulf was, pointed out what it would take to get ships or airplanes from Iraq to the Eastern United States and then asked how they could reasonably think he was any kind of threat to the US.

9/11. I'm teaching at a business school. Three of us try to give our students some context as to why people in, say, Palestine and Iran were jubilant over the attacks. My boss calls us all on the carpet. In the course of the conversation, we tell her what we said and she did not know that the US government overthrew the *rightfully elected government of Iran in the late 50's, installed a brutal dictator who ruled Iran for another quarter century before being over thrown in the Iranian revolution in 1979. None. This was something she was *alive* for! When I reminded her about the hostages who were held for 444 days, she remembered that! Oh yes, she certainly remembered that. But did not realize that the two events were correlated and was, in fact part of one another!

As far as Google Earth and the CWF, I'm not saying that people don't know about these tools. I'm saying that people wouldn't use them and would look down the nose of those who would think it important to do so to have the context of a presidential speech.

[Kast]

ALL OF THIS IS PUBLIC INFORMATION AND THEY WANT US TO SHARE IT:

The Internet is about to be taken down in America !!

Internet kill switch plan approved 6/25/10

http://news.techworld.com/security/3228198/obama-internet-kill-switch-plan-approved-by-us-senate/?olo=rss

Blueprint for De-population - declassified passed in Congress

http://www.theinterim.com/july98/20nssm.html

This explains how we lost our government:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7886780711843120756#

Lindsey Williams - The Elite Speak - tells us their plans for us and what this oil spill is about:

YouTube- Lindsey Williams - The Elite Speak - DVD 1 Part 1 - Jan/Feb 2010 (To Seduce a Nation)


In DVD 7, Lindsey Williams talks about how these elite have a moral code to tell us what they are going to do before they do it. Such as, the movie "Oil Storm" came out 2 weeks before hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans - Port Fourchor, which the script was written under their direction. Williams says there are some things in that movie that have not happened yet, that we should watch it.

He basically confirmed our suspicions that the elite do have the capability to steer hurricanes and steered Katrina into New Orleans. He says that this is done by heating the air in front of the wind which creates a path. We might assume that the chemtrail campaign which has been linked to HAARP is also somehow involved with this end game scheme of destruction, even though this wasn't specifally mentioned here. He recommended that we study the book, 'Angels Don't Play this HAARP'.

In DVD 8, He talks about how we are being 'marked' with 'chips' by the vaccines, that the chips are put in the needles and are 'nano' in size. That the health care bill is about total government takeover, to read the fine print.

In DVD 9, Williams says, "The Chinese are the strong ones. America is going to be relegated to third world status. The New World Order has made other nations their focal point. They have moved our industry abroad. We will be relegated to third world status after the elite complete their New World Order status."

Johnson says, "The person they most respect is Dmitru Duduman. They put him on the electric chair twice to get him to tell how he was smuggling Bibles. When the electricity was going through his body, the angel Gabriel showed up in the room and said, 'You're going to America to give them a warning from God'. When he got here the angel Gabriel came to him and said, 'that the fall of America would begin by an internal revolution started by the 'Communists'. Some of the people will start fighting against the government. The government will be busy with internal problems. Then from the oceans Russia, Cuba, Nicarauga, Central America, Mexico, and two other countries will attack and defeat America within one hour. Revelation 18, Jeremiah 50-51, other verses in the Bible will be fulfilled."

Revelation and Jeremiah compared:

http://www.lastdaysmystery.info/revelation_and_jeremiah_compared.htm

Unbelievable - Guillotines in the FEMA concentration camps, passed in Congress... millions of coffins are sitting outside the FEMA camps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1yaaW37CoM


http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/con_camps.htm

"The Gehlen Organization, copying Hitler's New Order, established a concentration camp system in San Luis Obispo County. It was called the California Specialized Training Institute. It developed plans called the *King Alfred Plan, Operation Cable Splitter, Operation Garden Plot,* and *REX-84* and was later renamed as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). You can get more information on these subjects from Militia of Montana, Bo Gritz, *Spotlight Newspaper,* etc."

Mandatory Counseling on Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia

http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/euthanasia.asp

You won't be able to fly on airplane (leave the country)... nor own a gun, all it takes is any doctor to deem you 'unstable' with no psychiatric testing.

Your tap water is mostly likely contaminated with pathogens from the oil spill. All food is suspect, look for black specks in your meat and vegetables, all fish is most likely contaminated to some degree:

Kellogg recalls 4 cereals for odd odor, flavor

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/25/1700474/kellogg-recalls-some-cereals-for.html#ixzz0s0KnRRq3

Strange looking bacon

"Opened a new package of Farmer John bacon to cook for breakfast this morning but the bacon looked so strange I was afraid to eat it. I have never seen bacon that looked like this."

Report: Toxins found in whales bode ill for humans

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100624/ap_on_sc/whaling

250,000 Oil Spills in U.S. Waters, 1971-2000

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/3V33Hh/www....971-2000.html/r:t

Supposedly only 3% of the Press is not corrupt, you have to search them out, they are trying to make a difference.

Safely Storing Emergency Water

http://firstaid.about.com/od/emergencypreparation/qt/07_water_supply.htm

[MsMerrick]

fun quiz:

http://www.bbhq.com/civquiz.htm

Fun
I should have done better than I did but I did ok..

[Corkey]

*shakes my head*
I don't know what to say that will not be taken wrong, but all I can say that's fit to read is REALLY????? Good grief.

[Kast]

*shakes my head*
I don't know what to say that will not be taken wrong, but all I can say that's fit to read is REALLY????? Good grief.

Hey Corkey, I need to talk to the Hopi - is there anyone on here that's in their tribe... ?

I've been doing research on Lyme and Morgellons and I stumbled on all of this, there's reason to believe that these "mystery" diseases will be in the water, too. I have been on a site researching and this is where my research lead me... I don't work for them!! I've been allowed to continue but I can't mention the diseases because they aren't public knowledge yet.

Tell the Hopi that the chemtrails are their 'spiderwebs', it creates a fungus that looks like a web, and the dispersants are the 'rivers of rocks' and that people should be flocking to them soon. The air and water are going to be contaminated and to get into their caves and to store lots of water.

[Corkey]

Kam I really don't have a clue what you are referring to here. Are the Hopi going to tell you anything? Um probably not. I don't understand why you are posting this stuff, and what it has to do with anything. Are you referring to the End time? 'Cause if you are it isn't about diseases and the sky falling, really.

[dreadgeek]

ALL OF THIS IS PUBLIC INFORMATION AND THEY WANT US TO SHARE IT:

The Internet is about to be taken down in America !!



No, it isn't. The Internet is nowhere near about to be taken down in America and if someone read the whole article--as opposed to just looking at the headline, you would realize that.


Internet kill switch plan approved 6/25/10

http://news.techworld.com/security/3228198/obama-internet-kill-switch-plan-approved-by-us-senate/?olo=rss

It got out of committee. That's not building anything. That doesn't even get it to the floor of the Senate. It got out of committee.


Blueprint for De-population - declassified passed in Congress

http://www.theinterim.com/july98/20nssm.html


Lies. Yes, outright lies. The report has two recommendations--two--make education and birth control available to women. Not a plan for de-population, ideas to slow the rate of population growth. We KNOW that when women are better educated and have access to birth control they have fewer children. When women have access to better medical care and thus their children have that access, they have fewer children. This pattern repeats everywhere that education, birth control and access to medical care grows. Everywhere.


He basically confirmed our suspicions that the elite do have the capability to steer hurricanes and steered Katrina into New Orleans. He says that this is done by heating the air in front of the wind which creates a path.

ROFLMAO!!!!! Control a hurricane? You have GOT to be kidding! Hurricanes cannot be steered, not by any technology on this planet.


We might assume that the chemtrail campaign which has been linked to HAARP is also somehow involved with this end game scheme of destruction, even though this wasn't specifally mentioned here. He recommended that we study the book, 'Angels Don't Play this HAARP'.

I'm sure he did. One would be FAR better served studying some basic chemistry and physics to understand why jet aircraft leave contrails (hint: it has to do with what happens when hot humid air meets very cold air at low pressure--jets fly at an altitude of VERY low pressure which is why the jets are pressurized). Again, this isn't my opinion about jet airplanes and the physics, it's the *facts* about jet airplanes and physics.


In DVD 8, He talks about how we are being 'marked' with 'chips' by the vaccines, that the chips are put in the needles and are 'nano' in size. That the health care bill is about total government takeover, to read the fine print.


ROFLMAO Take 2. No, we are not. And the health care bill is not a total government takeover. If you actually DO read the bill--and this guy knows you aren't going to read the bill--you'll see that.


Johnson says, "The person they most respect is Dmitru Duduman. They put him on the electric chair twice to get him to tell how he was smuggling Bibles. When the electricity was going through his body, the angel Gabriel showed up in the room and said, 'You're going to America to give them a warning from God'. When he got here the angel Gabriel came to him and said, 'that the fall of America would begin by an internal revolution started by the 'Communists'.

I'm just going to sit here in stunned silence, my mouth agape for a moment because I really don't believe I'm reading this. The angel Gabriel. Invoked in a discussion of politics. I don't even know what to say.


Some of the people will start fighting against the government. The government will be busy with internal problems. Then from the oceans Russia, Cuba, Nicarauga, Central America, Mexico, and two other countries will attack and defeat America within one hour. Revelation 18, Jeremiah 50-51, other verses in the Bible will be fulfilled."

ROFL!! That's the plot of Red Dawn!!! You do realize that don't you?


Mandatory Counseling on Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia

http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/euthanasia.asp

Okay this is the best one yet! You didn't even read the Snopes article. In your rush to copy and paste as many links of paranoia as you could find, you didn't take the time to read the first 6 lines of the Snopes piece on this rumour. It's FALSE. Word twenty-one in the actual section dealing with the rumour is False. In all caps and a 22 pt font. Next to a big red button so I can see how you could miss that on the page.


You won't be able to fly on airplane (leave the country)... nor own a gun, all it takes is any doctor to deem you 'unstable' with no psychiatric testing.

Not even remotely true.


Your tap water is mostly likely contaminated with pathogens from the oil spill. All food is suspect, look for black specks in your meat and vegetables, all fish is most likely contaminated to some degree:



ROFLMAO!!!! My goodness, doesn't anyone ever do critical thinking anymore? The Gulf of Mexico is SALT water. I am not aware of any American city that gets its municipal water from desalination. So you *cannot* have specks of oil in your drinking water from the oil spill because you aren't DRINKING water from the Gulf of Mexico. No one is irrigating food crops with that water either. Now, I want you to do this--because it's clear you didn't do this before--get a map of the area, notice the large river running north-to-south through the continent called the Mississipppi. Now, why on Earth would people living either off the Mississippi OR on top of a large aquifer get their water from a SALT water which has to be desalinated AND cleaned while the river and aquifer water just needs to be cleaned. Can you please explain that to me?

[MsDemeanor]

Rather than argue what I said, you managed to prove what I said.
Not all scientists can agree if global warming is happening. Not all scientists can agree that if it is happening whether it is caused by human actions or is a natural occurence.
"Not all scientists can agree" is an argument of the uninformed or ignorant. Understanding preponderance of evidence and overwhelming consensus in science are pretty basic skills.
The evolution debate is also linked to religion. Just because someone has religious beliefs that don't coincide with another person's belief in evolution does not mean they are uninformed or uneducated, it just means they have different beliefs.
People's religious beliefs don't have coincide, that's not the point. The point is that evolution, as Aj put it, is a matter of scientific evidence. Confusing religion with science is an argument of the uniformed or ignorant.
I'm not a fan of Palin, but some people think it is wonky thinking to take Obama seriously or Clinton seriously.
Yes, some unformed or ignorant people do think that Palin is the bomb and think that it is wonky to take those two men seriously. Obama is one of the smartest people in this country, and Clinton's right up there. Palin, on the other hand, has a clear and consistent track record of being not terribly bright. So, yeah, when someone thinks Obama's a joke and Palin's not, that person's not "tuned in" or "aware".
The points you are making above have to do with opinion not how informed someone is on issues or how willing they are to learn about issues. Otherwise you are saying that anyone that does not agree with you is uninformed. Surely you are not saying that?

Sorry, no. Global warming, evolution, and how smart Obama is next to Palin aren't opinions. I don't have a problem with someone disagreeing with me on facts. I have a huge problem with someone disagreeing with me because of their lack of facts and refusal to look at the facts.
Perhaps someone's belief that Saddam was involved in 9/11 is due to being influenced by media stories and hype. Part of the issue is that most of us don't know what to believe because most of what we read is biased and skewed, lacking facts, or poorly written. So perhaps if the President did say take out your map, here are the facts, maybe many of us would. We spend our days sorting through so much misinformation that most of us no longer know which side is up.

This conversation started because you said "I think more Americans are tuned in, aware, and concerned than you could imagine." Now you're saying that most of you don't know how to sort out the facts from the crap. Which is it?

My larger point is not to point fingers at the masses or people who disagree with you, but to point out the problems with sources of information.

Again, all those tuned in, aware, and concerned Americans should be able to weight information against it's sources.

I would also add that I think most of the problem is not to do with lack of knowledge of facts and info bites, but lack of critical thinking and analysis. Teaching people how to think is more important than teaching them what to think.

Again, gotta disagree. Teaching people how to think is vitally important, agreed. But, teaching them what to think is also important. All the critical thinking skills in the world mean nothing if they're taught to believe that the earth is 6,000 years old. No amount of critical thinking skills are going to help those school kids in Texas who are having American history replaced by Conservative indoctrination. You can't critically think your way out of a paper bag if you don't have facts.

[MsDemeanor]

I am not aware of any American city that gets its municipal water from desalination.
Aj, the largest desalination plant in the US is in Tampa Bay, FL. It's had numerous problems over the years and still isn't running at full capacity, but I'd venture a guess that its use could be impacted by the spill, should the oil flow near shore in that area. Of course, you and I know that the people who run the plant and the people who run the city aren't completely stupid - if oil is going to be an issue, they'll shut down the plant.

Little facts aside, that's still not going to cause any of the nonsense in that article. I'm not sure it even takes critical thinking to see how absurd it is; paying attention to the "this how clouds form and where rain comes from" lecture in elementary school should cover it.

[dreadgeek]

Aj, the largest desalination plant in the US is in Tampa Bay, FL. It's had numerous problems over the years and still isn't running at full capacity, but I'd venture a guess that its use could be impacted by the spill, should the oil flow near shore in that area. Of course, you and I know that the people who run the plant and the people who run the city aren't completely stupid - if oil is going to be an issue, they'll shut down the plant.

Little facts aside, that's still not going to cause any of the nonsense in that article. I'm not sure it even takes critical thinking to see how absurd it is; paying attention to the "this how clouds form and where rain comes from" lecture in elementary school should cover it.

Ms D;

Thank you for the correction. I was rushed writing that last post because I was trying to get the post done before I took Jaime to a nice French restaurant for our anniversary. As such I didn't have time to fact-check whether or not desalination was used in American cities along the gulf.

I also want to thank you for the points you made to Rufusboi because they were spot on. We live in a world saturated by information and yet people don't take the time to get even the most basic facts down. What's more, while it's important to teach people how to think there are books that any literate person capable of reading at a 7th or 8th grade level could get through that will help you learn HOW to think logically. (It's a skill and I am mystified why no one would suggest that one could become a pianist--of any skill level still worthy of the name--only after practice but people assume logical and rational thinking is just something that magically happens.)

There are books one can buy at Amazon or check out of any public library that are, for all purposes, a philosophy 101 class. And not dry stuff either. Janet Radcliffe Richards (a British feminist) has two books--one out of print but available the library nevertheless--that are textbooks for philosophy 101. They are "Human Nature After Darwin" and "The Skeptical Feminist". Both use their subject matter to do double-duty--if you know nothing about Darwinian theory the first is a reasonably good introduction to the theory and at the same time, also teaches critical thinking skills. The latter book does the same thing for feminism--introduces the subject and teaches critical thinking skills while doing so.

Yet people don't avail themselves of all this information they are awash in. So it drives me to distraction when people claim that I'm being somehow elitist to suggest that if someone says, just to take one very familiar howler regarding Darwinism, "if we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys", they are evidencing a deep and profound level of ignorance about the subject. It would be like someone claiming that someone who says 1 + 1 = 5 isn't ignorant of math they've just been fooled by the media or what-have-you. No, anyone who says that 1 + 1 = any real or rational number OTHER than 2 that person is actually, really, and truly ignorant of mathematics and there is no reason to take a single thing they have to say on the subject of math seriously.

As far as the relative intelligences of Obama, Clinton and Palin--it is remarkable that anyone would try to compare those three. The first two are in a class of intellect that were I in the same room as them I would be *humbled* to be in their presence and I’m no intellectual slouch. Meeting either one of them would be, for me, nothing so much as like Luke Skywalker realizing that he was in the presence of Yoda for the first time. (Although I'd be less whiny about it) Palin, on the other hand, evidences a truly breathtaking ignorance about pretty much any subject she spouts off on. What's even more remarkable is that we are supposed to believe that a man who got into one of the best schools in the country on a *scholarship* and then went to the best law school in the country, becoming editor of the most prestigious academic legal publication in the country (can ANYONE here who isn't a lawyer or isn't related to a lawyer name a single legal journal OTHER than the Harvard Law Review?) and then teaching Constitutional law at the University of Chicago (another tier-1 school) is less intelligent than a woman who went to five different colleges--none of them any higher than tier-2 before graduating with a degree in communications? We are also supposed to believe that this same person is more intelligent than someone who ALSO went to a tier-1 school (Yale) on a scholarship and then was a Rhodes Scholar. Really? By that logic, I am the both a faster runner than Wilma Rudolf or Carl Lewis AND a better cyclist than Lance Armstrong since showing *less* ability is somehow, in some strange kind of Zen-inspired koan, to actually show superior ability.

[Toughy]

just in case Rufus was talking about Hilary Clinton......

In 1969 she was the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley. She later graduated from Yale Law School and became the first female partner at Rose Law Firm. During that time she was twice listed among the top 100 lawyers in this country.

Her time as first Lady is well known. She was elected to the Senate in 2000. She was the first viable woman candidate for POTUS. Obama selected her as his Secretary of State.

Hilary ain't no slouch in the brains department.

Palin on the other hand could not think her way out of a paper bag.

[Rufusboi]

It is true that not ALL scientists agree that global warming is happening. But the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community is that global warming is happening and that the most parsimonious cause is that it is anthropogenic. It is the explanation that best fits the data. What's more, the scientists who tend to *disagree* with the consensus are not, in fact, geophysicists or climate scientists--rather they tend to come from outside the field. Lastly, some of the scientists who claim to disagree with global warming are actually engineers. With no insult meant to any engineers in the house but engineering is not science. It is based upon science but it is not science itself.

Evolution is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of scientific evidence. I know that this is going to insult some folks but there's really no kind way to put this--if you deny that evolution happened then you are manifestly and seriously misinformed about biology. That's harsh but it also has the virtue of being true. ALL of the evidence in biology is on the side of evolution and NONE of it is on the side of any other explanation which, let's be honest, is creationism. Intelligent design is just creationism disguised to pass Constitutional muster. Again, ALL of the evidence in biology is on the side of evolution and NONE of it is on the side of any other explanation. This isn't a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying to you or doesn't know the literature.

All of the genetic evidence points to common descent.
Incipient structures point to common descent.
Transitional fossils point to common descent.
That we can *reliably* calculate the distance between any two species for which we have a complete genome within a margin of error of around +/- 1% points to common descent.
The fossil record points to common descent.
Species in transition toward speciation (the northern ring gulls around the Arctic circle) point to the fact that our model of speciation appears to be correct.
The fact that certain genes code for the same thing across phylum speaks to common descent. For example, the same gene that codes 'make eyes here' in fruit flies does the same job in rats, mice, humans in fact ALL of the placental mammals use the same gene (memory slips me if the marsupials use that gene but I believe they do). This doesn't specify what KIND of eyes grow in the location it simply specifies "whatever kind of eyes are going to be built, build them here". The HOX2 gene is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom (HOX2 is one of the genes tasked with building the overall body plan.)

I could go on and on but you get the picture. Evolution is the only *reasonable*, testable explanation subject to falsification going. Might an intelligent designer have created all of it? Sure, it's *possible*. But just because something is *possible* doesn't mean it is at all reasonable to assume that it happened. The problem with intelligent design is that it can't be falsified. Intelligent design proponents avoid the subject of falsification because they *know* they don't actually care if it can be falsified or not. If it can't be falsified it's not science. It might be art, poetry, religion or drama but it isn't science. Evolutionary theory can be falsified and has withstood every single challenge thrown at it in the last 150 years. Every anomaly so far has been accounted for.

Look, if someone said that the Sun orbits the Earth every single person here would say that person is ignorant of physics. If someone said that Abraham Lincoln was never President of the United States every single person here would say that person was ignorant of U.S. history. If someone said that space and time are two separate things then anyone who knows Relativity would say that person was ignorant of the that subject. And if someone maintains that evolutionary theory is wrong then that person is demonstrating their manifest ignorance of biology. I'm sorry, I know that's harsh, but it is still true. Yes, I know that there are biology teachers who claim that they don't accept the theory of evolution--they are either lying or they got their biology degree from a Christian college that taught them lies about the science of biology. Yes, I used the term lies because they are lies. To say that there are no transitional fossils is to lie. To say that there are irreducibly complex structures is to lie.



No, it is due to not being skeptical, doing about 15 minutes worth of research on Google. It's this simple. Saddam Hussein was a Baathist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba'ath_Party). The Baathist are secular pan-Arabists and outside of using religion as a prop, take a pretty standard Jacobin Socialist line on religion--namely that it's bunk but is a tool of social control. The 9/11 hijackers were all members of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is a Wahhabi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabi)-influenced group of Sunni Muslims. To put it into American cultural context, the Baath party would be somewhat akin to the Communist Party in Stalinist Russia and Wahhabism is to Islam as Southern Baptist is to Christianity. So what you are saying, in essence, is that the militaristic arm of a fanatically devout sect of Islam--whose leader, by the way, called for the head of Saddam Hussein for being an apostate--got into bed with a secular socialist who would just as soon be done away with religion entirely. Again, to put it into context that would be like saying that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are the two top donors to the ACLU! Now, this is information that if you had read anything about the Middle East you would have known as of 9 Sep 2001. But if you hadn't it was STILL information that existed and I simply Googled and linked to the very first result returned--which turned out to be Wikipedia articles.

These are not hidden or classified sources. They are totally open sources and so if someone believes that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 or even thinks it is plausible it is because they didn't take the time to Google some terms that they were probably not familiar with before 11 Sep 2001. Terms like Wahhabi and Baath party and Sunni and pan-Arabism. If information is available--and it is--and the information is important--and it is--and someone doesn't take the time to go out and confirm for themselves that is THEIR fault, not the fault of society or the media.

Cheers
Aj



I'm not trying to argue global warming or evolution. I was arguing the point you made about the masses being uninformed. I don't agree with that opinion.

Rufus

[Rufusboi]

As far as Google Earth and the CWF, I'm not saying that people don't know about these tools. I'm saying that people wouldn't use them and would look down the nose of those who would think it important to do so to have the context of a presidential speech.


Ok - that's where we differ in opinion, I think a lot of people would use these tools. I think people use them everyday. I think you underestimate the majority of Americans. I don't think people would look down their noses. Look, we are just differing in opinions that we have no facts or stats to support. I just think the American population is a little more tuned in than you do. Can I prove that, no. Can you prove most would look down their noses, no.

Rufus

[Rufusboi]

Again, gotta disagree. Teaching people how to think is vitally important, agreed. But, teaching them what to think is also important. All the critical thinking skills in the world mean nothing if they're taught to believe that the earth is 6,000 years old. No amount of critical thinking skills are going to help those school kids in Texas who are having American history replaced by Conservative indoctrination. You can't critically think your way out of a paper bag if you don't have facts.

Totally disagree here. If people have critical thinking skills they can find the information and understand the information they find and can learn that the earth is not 6,000 years old. THey will know the difference beween religion and science. Critical thinking will teach the kids in Texas not to take those textbooks at face Value.

That's the whole point of critical thinking, you question everything you read and hear!! You don't need facts to critiically think your way our of a paper bag, you need to know to question all received information.

If people are taught what to think rather than how to think, then we will definitely have a nation of sheep because those in power will be teaching the "what." If people are taught how to think and have strong critical thinking skills then they are independent thinkers and won't be led around by people who are trying to teach them "what' to think.

Teaching people "What" to think just scares me. Its brainwashing.

Rufus

[dreadgeek]

I'm not trying to argue global warming or evolution. I was arguing the point you made about the masses being uninformed. I don't agree with that opinion.

Rufus

Then what do you call it when someone has the facts available to them, doesn't avail themselves of those facts and then holds opinions that are erroneous? If it's not uninformed and it's not ignorant, what on Earth is it? What IS uninformed if not acquiring relevant facts related to an opinion BEFORE forming an opinion? What is ignorant if not espousing an opinion on a matter to which one either has no facts or has what they believe to be facts but is really incorrect information?

I wasn't trying to argue either global warming or evolution. I was arguing that the evidence for both of those is solid enough that to hold an opinion contrary to them is ignorant and/or uninformed. It would be equally ignorant and/or uninformed to say that the Sun orbits the Earth or that Barack Obama is not currently President of the United States and for the same kinds of reasons--the overwhelming evidence points to those conclusions. People may not believe that to be the case, but they are wrong.

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, no one is entitled to their own facts." -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

[Rufusboi]

Then what do you call it when someone has the facts available to them, doesn't avail themselves of those facts and then holds opinions that are erroneous? If it's not uninformed and it's not ignorant, what on Earth is it? What IS uninformed if not acquiring relevant facts related to an opinion BEFORE forming an opinion? What is ignorant if not espousing an opinion on a matter to which one either has no facts or has what they believe to be facts but is really incorrect information?

I wasn't trying to argue either global warming or evolution. I was arguing that the evidence for both of those is solid enough that to hold an opinion contrary to them is ignorant and/or uninformed. It would be equally ignorant and/or uninformed to say that the Sun orbits the Earth or that Barack Obama is not currently President of the United States and for the same kinds of reasons--the overwhelming evidence points to those conclusions. People may not believe that to be the case, but they are wrong.

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, no one is entitled to their own facts." -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I would call it ignorance just like you do. But getting back to my original point. You offered a general opinion that most people would look down at someone who got out their Google map or went to the CIA factbook site. My opinoin is that most would not. Focus on the word "most." You tend to think a large majority of Americans scoff at education, while I don't.

There will always be crazy thinkers, people who insist up is down. Not much we can do about that. They exist in all countires at all times. My point is that you tend to scoff at a lot of people who given the opportuniuty would welcome some facts and straight talking. Its easy to point fingers and say this person is dumb, that person is uneducated. But rather than blaming the individual we need to think in larger terms.

My larger point is not to point fingers at the masses or people who disagree with you, but to point out the problems with sources of information. My other point, made mostly to Msdeamenor, is if we focus on critical thinking, rather than shoving people full of facts to take a test, we will end up with more independent thinkers who have the ability to sort through the crap. We will teach people how to think, not what to think.

Its my belief that the problem is rooted in the school system. We no longer teach critical thinking. It is a learned skill. It is not easy to learn this skill alone. We need a school and social system that supports this type of thinking and learning. We don't have that. Based on some of your prior posts you think that an individual can pick up a book and teach themselves critical thinking and logic, I happen to disagree with this. Yes, it is a learned skill but it can't be done in isolation.

Rufus

[MsDemeanor]

I would call it ignorance just like you do. But getting back to my original point. You offered a general opinion that most people would look down at someone who got out their Google map or went to the CIA factbook site. My opinoin is that most would not. Focus on the word "most." You tend to think a large majority of Americans scoff at education, while I don't.
That's not what Aj said. You're the only one in this conversation who has stated that we're talking about a majority of or most Americans. This reflects part of our opinion that facts matter in critical thinking, in that it appears to me that you're trying to critically think and present an argument based on something that wasn't said.

President Obama gave his first Oval Office speech on the Gulf disaster recently. 32 million people watched - roughly 10% of the US population. Of the other 90%, some are young children, at work, infirmed, etc. and clearly not capable of watching or clearly too young. What about everyone else? Are they already so informed that they had no need to watch or do they not care enough to bother? Even more disturbing, the largest audience for post-speech coverage watched O'Reilly on Faux Newz. 3.6 million - 10% of the viewers and 1% of the population (roughly) - people chose as their source of post-speech analysis the single worst place in all of television in which to get anything resembling either facts or critical analysis.

[MsDemeanor]

I was trying to get the post done before I took Jaime to a nice French restaurant for our anniversary.
Happy Anniversary!!!!

[Rufusboi]

That's not what Aj said. You're the only one in this conversation who has stated that we're talking about a majority of or most Americans. This reflects part of our opinion that facts matter in critical thinking, in that it appears to me that you're trying to critically think and present an argument based on something that wasn't said.

President Obama gave his first Oval Office speech on the Gulf disaster recently. 32 million people watched - roughly 10% of the US population. Of the other 90%, some are young children, at work, infirmed, etc. and clearly not capable of watching or clearly too young. What about everyone else? Are they already so informed that they had no need to watch or do they not care enough to bother? Even more disturbing, the largest audience for post-speech coverage watched O'Reilly on Faux Newz. 3.6 million - 10% of the viewers and 1% of the population (roughly) - people chose as their source of post-speech analysis the single worst place in all of television in which to get anything resembling either facts or critical analysis.



You're right. Dreadgeek did not say most. Dreadgeek asked how many people do we know who would check Google Earth and the CIA factbook and how many would look down their noses at those that did? These were rhetorical questions. The unstated response/belief behind that rhetorical question is....not many. The rhetorical question itself assumed that readers would agree. I just chose to point out that I didn't.

Unless Dreadgeek wants to correct my assumption and let me know that the question was literal and she wanted an actual number for how many people I personally know who would or would not scoff or who would or would not go to Google Earth and the CIA factbook. I can get those numbers but it might take a while. So I jumped in and answered the unstated assumption behind the rhetorical question and said Many. More than you give Americans credit for.

I happen to think more people would than would not. I mean, really, this is all we are arguing about. Opinions. Dreadgeek's opinion not so many, my opinion, more that you are willing to give credit for. Other than that I'm not disagreeing with anything you say. I'm debating a few points you make, that's all.

And based on the stats you used above about FOX I'm really happy that according to those stats only 10% of the viewers and only 1% of the population (where did you get those stats from? No link or citation was posted. ) tuned into Fox for post speech discussion.

So very tentitively based on those uncited stats whose credibility I have no way of checking because I don't know the source, I'll go out on a limb and say, America, I'm proud of ya for choosing not to click over to FOX News.

Perhaps, America, you found other sources of information that you think are more credible. Or, maybe you just went to bed. Or maybe you listened, thought about it, came to your own conclusions and chose not to tune into any of the post analysis opinions that clog the airwaves. Maybe you just watched a Seinfeld rerun.

And perhaps part of the 10% that did tune into Fox went there to see what the opposition was saying, then they jammed on over to MSNBC, then they hit the internet to check on their favorite blog sites, and so on because maybe they wanted to get a bigger view of all the various discussions because they didn't want to just be tied to one point of view or party line. Or maybe some of those 10% had FOX on because Uncle Walter was over for dinner and he refuses to watch anything but FOX, so to keep the family peace they just handed him the remote. We'll never know. All we have is that stat staring us in the face. Some will argue that stat is too high and proves x, y and z. Some might cheer, like me, and say yippee, only 1% of the population tuned into FOX's post analysis and this proves x, y and z.

And maybe stats don't tell us much after all.


Rufus

[MsDemeanor]

My apologies for not posting sources.

linkyloo (http://www.examiner.com/x-40953-Political-Media-Examiner%7Ey2010m6d17-The-President-gets-top-TV-ratings-for-speech-but-NBA-and-murder-come-in-close-second)

They watched basketball and murder fiction:

right after he was done, tens of millions of viewers switched off the analysts, and turned to NCIS repeats and the pre-game show of Game 6 of the NBA Finals championship series between the Lakers and the Celtics.

linkyloo (http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/president-obamas-gulf-speech-drew-fewer-viewers-than-other-recent-addresses/)

[AtLast]

just in case Rufus was talking about Hilary Clinton......

In 1969 she was the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley. She later graduated from Yale Law School and became the first female partner at Rose Law Firm. During that time she was twice listed among the top 100 lawyers in this country.

Her time as first Lady is well known. She was elected to the Senate in 2000. She was the first viable woman candidate for POTUS. Obama selected her as his Secretary of State.

Hilary ain't no slouch in the brains department.

Palin on the other hand could not think her way out of a paper bag.

She sure as hell isn't! And taken some horrible abuse from the media and the right wing-nut wagon of crazies! The woman has worked on behalf of so many for damn long time. She has earned the respect of many on both sides of the political isle for the simply fact that she gets things done!

A friend and I were talking the other day about the days of true legislators in Congress and how presidents such as LBJ knew how to legislate! Agree or disagree with legislation, but, todays deadlocked Congress is not representative of the Democratic process of the US and is a disgrace! It also represents how we absolutely need to change political campaign funding! Public funding must be adopted or we can kiss any semblance of a democratic republic goodbye!

Hilary Clinton has made her own strides very much appart from Bill. She is bright, articulate and loyal and a true diplomat and stateswoman. Have I always agreed with her? No. But she does not sit on her ass or rest on her laurels. And I respect this. Palin is just not an intelligent person. Frankly, there are some GOP women that I could support (albeit, very moderate)... but they know their history, the Constitution and what legislation is all about.

Side note- I was happy that Rachael Maddow closed her week’s programming summing up what Obama has indeed, accomplished. And under the political web of NO via the GOP. Not bad, really. Not all that I wanted and a few things I didn’t, but, I will give credit where due. Especially since we do not have the kind of guts in our elected officials that we did in many past leaders that actually knew how to legislate and make decisions.

[dreadgeek]

You're right. Dreadgeek did not say most. Dreadgeek asked how many people do we know who would check Google Earth and the CIA factbook and how many would look down their noses at those that did? These were rhetorical questions. The unstated response/belief behind that rhetorical question is....not many. The rhetorical question itself assumed that readers would agree. I just chose to point out that I didn't.

Yes, it was a rhetorical question but I didn't have a number in mind. If I HAD to put a number I would say that as much as 40% of the American population either would either not bother looking going to a map and/or taking other actions based upon the following:

A Roper ASW poll found that 87% of Americans 18 - 24 couldn't find Iraq on a map, 83% couldn't find Afghanistan on a map and 11% couldn't find the United States on a map. Let that sink in for a moment...slightly more than 10% couldn't find their OWN country on a map!

Only half of the population will buy a book of ANY sort this year.

According to another study, only 53% of the American population know that a year is the time it takes the Earth to revolve around the Sun. Only 59% know that humans and dinosaurs didn't live at the same time. Only 47% can correctly estimate the amount of the Earth that is covered in water.

Again, let that sink in. Fully 47% of the population doesn't know something as basic as what a year *actually* is. 41% believe, against all available evidence, that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. These aren't kids, these are adults. And yet we are supposed to be sanguine that large numbers of people would go out and take the time to educate themselves on some matter when they could just as easily watch American Idol? I see nothing to be sanguine about. If 10% of adults thought humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time--again there is no evidence in support of the idea that they did and every piece of available evidence says they didn't--that would be disturbing in itself. The idea that four times that percentage don't is deeply troubling.



Unless Dreadgeek wants to correct my assumption and let me know that the question was literal and she wanted an actual number for how many people I personally know who would or would not scoff or who would or would not go to Google Earth and the CIA factbook. I can get those numbers but it might take a while. So I jumped in and answered the unstated assumption behind the rhetorical question and said Many. More than you give Americans credit for.

If that is the case then how would YOU go about explaining the kinds of numbers above? Look around the Internet all you wish, every study or poll you find will have numbers in and around the same orbits. I wasn't saying nor did I mean to imply that a majority wouldn't bother or would scoff, I probably should have said a disturbingly large minority to have avoided this. But if the American people, overall, are so well informed can you explain why large numbers (40% of the American people is a significant number of adults) don't know basic things like why we have seasons, what a year is, what a day is.


I happen to think more people would than would not. I mean, really, this is all we are arguing about.

Based upon what?


Opinions. Dreadgeek's opinion not so many, my opinion, more that you are willing to give credit for. Other than that I'm not disagreeing with anything you say. I'm debating a few points you make, that's all.

Okay then I mistook what you were saying. Because when you stated that if someone disagrees about evolution it doesn't make them ignorant it read, to me, like you were saying that it was possible for someone to be well versed in biology, know evolutionary biology at a level one could call a reasonably informed layperson, and still disagree with the theory. I would strenuously disagree. The only people I know who disagree with evolutionary theory are either inveterate liars (Michael Behe) or cranks (Fred Hoyle) or have no idea what the theory actually states (everyone else who argues against evolution using arguments of the form "well, if evolution happened where is the half-crocodile, half-man" or "if evolution happened and we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys" or "evolution is only a theory").


And maybe stats don't tell us much after all.

Or maybe it depends upon where the stats come from, how they were gathered, and how methodologically sound the survey, study or poll was in its execution. There are stats that come from, say, NARTH that I don't buy because NARTH has no interest whatsoever in empiricism--they just like using the language of empiricism to bolster their manifestly unscientific positions vis a vis homosexuality. If, on the other hand, the AAS (American Academy of Science) or the NSF (National Science Foundation) conducts a study or sponsors one, I'm going to give it some credence because both of those organizations *do* care very much about empirical data and well-designed survey tools.

I get it that you disagree that large numbers--again not a majority but one-third of a population is NOT a trivial number--of the American people are not profoundly and willfully ignorant on a number of subjects. I have no idea why you believe that or upon what a reasonable person (which I like to think I am) might base such a belief other than sheer, willful, wishful thinking. However, I would love for you to explain to me why I am wrong because here is an instance where I would be overjoyed--turning cartwheels and shouting hallelujahs from every rooftop in a 5 mile radius overjoyed--if I were. Hell, if I were wrong I would weep in joy and probably die of relieved ecstasy.

So, lay it on me. Why am I wrong? Wishful thinking notwithstanding. Really, I want to be wrong about this.

Cheers
Aj

[Andrew, Jr.]

A pregnant woman, 23 yo, was shot several times today. She will recover but the child was lost. It was gang related. Sad.

[dreadgeek]

I would call it ignorance just like you do. But getting back to my original point. You offered a general opinion that most people would look down at someone who got out their Google map or went to the CIA factbook site. My opinoin is that most would not. Focus on the word "most." You tend to think a large majority of Americans scoff at education, while I don't.

Umm, I'll let the handwaving go but really, my core point has NOTHING to do with Google Earth or the CIA Factbook. It was a throwaway statement that is not core to the point that I'm making.


There will always be crazy thinkers, people who insist up is down.

I'm not going to call 40% of Americans who don't realize what a year actually is crazy thinkers. I'm going to call them tragically uninformed.


Not much we can do about that. They exist in all countires at all times. My point is that you tend to scoff at a lot of people who given the opportuniuty would welcome some facts and straight talking. Its easy to point fingers and say this person is dumb, that person is uneducated. But rather than blaming the individual we need to think in larger terms.

Perhaps you get the feeling that I think ignorance or being uninformed is somehow a measure of a person's moral worth in absolute terms. I don't. I am woefully uninformed about, to take just one of a possible laundry list, auto mechanics. If the answer is beyond "you have a flat tire" or "you're out of gas" or "the car's not turned on" and I say anything OTHER than "you should take your car to a mechanic" I am spouting off about things I know nothing about. There is no reason to take me seriously and every reason to say that I am uninformed about auto mechanics and/or that I am ignorant on the subject.


My larger point is not to point fingers at the masses or people who disagree with you, but to point out the problems with sources of information. My other point, made mostly to Msdeamenor, is if we focus on critical thinking, rather than shoving people full of facts to take a test, we will end up with more independent thinkers who have the ability to sort through the crap. We will teach people how to think, not what to think.

I'm sorry but you have to also give people good information. To take the "Earth is 6000 years old" example. What you are saying is that in the absence of any other information, if we just teach people to think critically they will come to the conclusion that the Earth isn't 6000 years old. I disagree. Without the evidence--the facts of the matter- no amount of critical thinking skills is going to do anyone any damn good. So while some might think that educating students on what, just to take one solid piece of evidence, red shift is and why this is proof that the Universe is expanding, is telling them what to think I would say that is giving them the *minimal* information upon which they can act as critical thinkers.


Its my belief that the problem is rooted in the school system. We no longer teach critical thinking. It is a learned skill. It is not easy to learn this skill alone. We need a school and social system that supports this type of thinking and learning. We don't have that. Based on some of your prior posts you think that an individual can pick up a book and teach themselves critical thinking and logic, I happen to disagree with this. Yes, it is a learned skill but it can't be done in isolation.

I strenuously disagree with this. Most strenuously. Over the course of my academic career I have taken precisely one philosophy class and that was a philosophy of science class. I learned logic and rhetoric, largely, by reading on my own--first were books that were just truly compelling arguments. Later came books about how thinking goes terribly wrong. After that I started picking up books that I realized, about a third of the way through, were probably textbooks being used in classes to teach logic. Now, I agree we should teach logic, rhetoric, critical thinking and the scientific method in schools. The only other thing one could really call formal training in logic were family dinners when I was growing up. My parents made my sister and I read an article out of the paper, we didn't have to commit it to memory but we did have to be able to hit the who, what, where, when, why and how if relevant. We would then be asked what we thought about the article and what we thought it meant. If we said something that couldn’t' be justified or if our argument had holes you could turn a 747 around in, then they would systematically go about eviscerating our position. This taught us that it wasn't good enough to have an opinion, it needed to be an informed opinion in order for others to have any justification for taking us seriously. Can I hold my own against a professor of logic, probably not but I've never had to put that to the test. I can say, however, that I am a reasonably logical thinker and that I hope I put together well-reasoned arguments that are internally consistent more times than not.

What's more, if you go back JUST 100 or 150 years, you see that autodidacts were all over the place and not just from the upper-classes. Thomas Paine, if memory serves, was not from the upper-class and ended up working as a apprentice to a printer. While there he taught himself philosophy, logic, rhetoric, political theory by reading the books that were being printed. So it *can* be done and not by just extraordinary people with extraordinary means. Would it be better if it was done in a formal classroom setting? Yes. But it *can* be done, but first one has to decide that given their limited discretionary time they would rather use it reading than watching American Idol and when reading they would rather it be something with meat on the bones instead of People magazine.

Cheers
Aj

[Delish]

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/06/27/3_Shot_in_San_Francisco_Pride_Event/

[Rufusboi]

The Founders bet that an educated and informed populace could keep a Republic going. I see no reason to doubt that this is true. The problem we face is that our public is no longer educated or informed and many do not want to be, preferring the quick fix of emotionally satisfying jingoism or pseudo-cynicism (which is really high idealism masquerading as cynicism).



Cheers
Aj



I agree that we need an educated and informed populace. You get no argument from me here. I will state, as a side note, that the founders envisioned a white male educated populace. So their definition of an educated populace wasn't that everyone needed to be educated, only certain people. It would be interesting to find out the percentage of the population that didn't know certain "givens" or "core knowledge" in 1800 versus today.

The concept of mass literacy is pretty new. I'm thinking late 1800s in Europe but it could have come about earlier in the US.

That brings me back to your next statement, and again, this is where we disagree. You think "many" (maybe this is where I got the "most" idea I had in my head) do not want to be either educated or informed. This is where we part ways. Maybe I am naive, maybe you are cynical. But I don't think "many" prefer being uneducated or uninformed. I think many are trying everyday to fix that in whatever way they can. Can I prove this? No. I can point to college enrollment stats, book purchasing stats, library card stats just as you can point to the same stats to make your argument.

The two links Msdemeanor provided were basically two opinions/intepretations of Neilson rating data. For me they showed and proved nothing. Just two writers giving me their interpretation of Neilsen data.

The stats you find tell you that people are wallowing in their ignorance and like it down there. The stats tell me that our education system is failing all of us. And cultivating cirtical thinking would put a pretty quick stop to the influence of "emotionally satisfying jingoism."

I don't know whether you teach in a public school, a private school, High school, or college (you mentioned business school) but as an educator, what are you going to do? How do we fix this lack of basic knowledge? And as an educator, why do you think people are ignorant and uninformed? To me, it goes a lot deeper than people just prefer being ignorant and uniformed.

Rufus

[MsDemeanor]

The two links Msdemeanor provided were basically two opinions/intepretations of Neilson rating data. For me they showed and proved nothing. Just two writers giving me their interpretation of Neilsen data.

What part of One in five households with television sets watched President Obama (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s Oval Office address about the gulf oil spill on Tuesday night, according to the Nielsen Company. An average of 24 million households and 32 million people tuned in to the almost 20-minute address, according to Nielsen, which counts only at-home viewing. is an interpretation that doesn't show or prove anything? Please explain your critical thinking process that led you to this conclusion.

[Mitmo01]

There can be a problem with Auto-Didactical thinking though....and that is there is no one bit yourself to challenge or critically analyze what it is your learning. ie--Hitler was an Auto-Didact.

If people want to learn they can, the problem is that you also have to be challenged and engaged and to do that is the function of higher education.