Into the Void

My take on the sixties:

I was born in 1957, 12 years after WWII The Big One ended. The Korean conflict came between the two events. As far as I can tell, I’m being labeled “Baby Boomer” only so that folks my age will fund the real boomers greedy retirement plans. Even as we speak, they are quietly moving their funds are from investments that have become UNSAFE due to their profit-taking. They don’t leave their money in the stock market as they get older. My group still does, and it will be disastrous. Stock Market “adjustments” are seen as inevitable, but when there is an adjustment it means that somebody is taking somebody else’s money. Who do you suppose it is? The poor? Not bloody likely. I used to think the stock market was a gamble. Now I realize that the game is fixed.

Many of these boomers were, as young adults, the hippies about which my friends speak so glowingly. The hippies headed for the hills when things got tough. Most of what you read about the culture of the ’60s was invented by students at Ivy League colleges who never knew the difficulties of living off handouts in the city. Free love was a farce - it wasn’t anything near free for the women - or girls - who got pregnant.

The Beatles brought a small vision of the world to public view, but they weren’t at the forefront. Not EVEN. They were Pop Icons at the tail end of the whole mess. The whole hippie thing had become a farce by the time the Beatles rolled out Sergeant Pepper’s.

So as a kid I heard many Great Ideas from my friends’ older, college-age siblings. Age of Aquarius, be-ins, freedom, evolution, revolution. But I watched the body counts in Viet Nam rise night after night on TV. I saw minorities fighting to be recognized not even as equals but as human beings. I saw the cops beating Blacks and college students and pretty much anyone they didn’t like the looks of to a pulp out in the streets. I lived in the aftermath of three assassinations. The Great Ideas vanished into thin air, leaving my generation with an intellectual wasteland.

The media doesn’t let that kind of information interfere with big business these days. There was even a ban on showing the rows of coffins from the Afghanistan and Iraq dead. I would watch that. Someone has to bear witness.

I suppose I should get more proactive. I’m too easy to silence, I’m mentally ill. I can be taken against my will into a hospital, drugged, zapped, whatever. Just say the word “anosognosia.” There are no political prisoners, no prisoners of conscience, only mental patients. My only recourse is to donate to the charities that are doing the real work. I don’t fool myself into thinking that throwing money at the problems will fix them. Money only generates more money - if the problems were solved, the charities would be out of business. I can only hope that they help a little bit.

Duck and cover, they told us as children. There was the constant threat of nuclear annihilation brought on by the hatred of my elders for folks just like us on the other side of the world. In the ’80s they told us to dig a hole in the backyard, lie down in it and cover yourself over if there’s a nuclear strike - dig your own goddam grave. “With enough shovels” was the slogan. This stupidity was successfully imitated in the aftermath of 9-11 Homeland Security told us to seal off a room with plastic and duct tape to protect ourselves from terrorists. I don’t think it will protect you, but it will definitely keep the smell down. Fear is a great strategy for controlling the populace.

I sat at work one night at 12 or 14 years old with a gun on the desk in front of me and the simple instructions: “If any <n -words> try to break in, shoot ‘em.” Camden was burning just a few blocks away. It was happening in cities across the country, the black people were looking for a better life. The owner left me to mind the store. The only <n -word> who showed up was a business associate that I’d known since I was a baby. He sat with me until the boss got back then ripped him a new asshole for leaving me there alone.

“Backlash, Backlash, Who do you think I am? You raise my taxes, freeze my wages, And send my son to Viet Nam. You gimme Second-class houses, And second-class schools, Do you think all colored people are just Second-class fools? Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you with the blues, yes I am.” – Langston Hughes, Nina Simone “Backlash Blues”

Backlash Blues didn’t get much airplay when it would have mattered. Now it’s used in a Lexus commercial to sell luxury automobiles. Langston Hughes would have seen the irony of it. A better life, indeed. I’m not sure whether a commercial with a good-looking African-American man grooving on the blues is supposed to be targeted for African-Americans. It motivated me to run out and get some Nina Simone CDs. I don’t want an SUV, thankyouverymuch.

So when I was a kid the air was bad, the rivers were full of poisons, raw sewage, and rotting fish. The Potomac river, backdrop to so many National Monuments, was so polluted that if you fell in the cops would take you off to the hospital. Rivers caught fire, the bald eagle was in danger of extinction. Our food was full of pesticides. The drug companies gave pregnant women Diethylstilbestrol (DES) and Thalidomide. Every species was manifesting serious anomalies from teratogens in the environment. EVERY species. Much later, William S. Burroughs drew attention to the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl with typical brutal honesty in an interview in 1986 in which he said, “Let me ask you one question, Doctor: You want your daughter born with two cunts?” He was referring to a condition known as “uterus didelphys.” Being born with two vaginas is also a side effect of maternal DES use.

The erstwhile hippies didn’t notice. If they did, they didn’t give a rat’s ass.

The Space Program, it turned out, wasn’t about our destiny among the stars. It was a non-war strategy for beating the Russians by outdoing them technologically. Reagan continued the strategy with space weapons programs in the ’80s. “Star Wars” was all about bankrupting “The Evil Empire” as he called the U.S.S.R..

Reagan also invented “trickle-down economics” which, as far as I can tell, involved giving all the money to the wealthy and the large corporations so that they can piss on the workers.

My generation lost hope long before Reagan came along. We smoked pot and listened to music. At the tail end of the boom, we were overcrowded everywhere we went and there were few jobs. On top of that, periodically there were gas crises with far-reaching economic effects, including stagflation. Stagflation is the situation I quoted above, where prices increase but salary doesn’t. More and more, we either lived at home until we were 30, in roachtraps in the city, or in group houses with four or more people. We were occasionally chased out of town with new zoning laws by the former hippies, but that’s another story for another day.

The American Dream has always been about taking care of the kids born right after WWII The Big One. It was used, along with religion, for keeping us quiet and obedient, at least until we figured out that it was all a big scam.

Suddenly the ’60s have become this Utopia. They are being totally rewritten. It’s very hip these days to pine for a Golden Age that never was, whether you pine for the ’60’s or for the post-war enthusiasm of our grandparents generation or for a mythical pre-industrial garden.

Maya, the world of illusion. Insanity is being able to see through the illusion. Insanity is rejecting the false values of your elders. So they tell us. It’s up to us to keep looking for the truth no matter how much they tell us to turn back to a glorious past that never was.

Technorati: politics music Nina+Simone The+Sixties baby+boomers hippies

Huffington Post: John Neffinger, Glynnis MacNicol, and Drew Westen| Dem Iowa Debate LiveBlog!

Debate? Not much of a debate, just a bunch of Dems comparing their talking points. Really, business as usual. The Democratic Party slinked off with their collective tails between their legs because they couldn’t come up with a response to the “soft on terrorism” card, and they’ve never really come back from that. I am almost ashamed to be a Democrat, but there is no better choice.
Biden was able to joke about saying stupid things, a reference to his “articulate and bright and clean” comment about Obama. Obama is good, he’d still be “articulate and bright and clean” by comparison if he were white. Compare him to our current Prex!
A Clinton-Obama ticket is not going to lure over any middle-of-the-road Republicans. Unfortunately, to win 2008 that’s what the Dems have to do. I hope they don’t forget.
I think Biden’s wife is going to get fired from her teaching job after his comment on school administrators.
Teachers are probably the only professionals who don’t get pay incentives for competence and effectiveness. Apparently the folks in the debate have no insight into punishment and reward. Throw all the money in the world at our schools, but if there is no incentive for teachers to further their own educations and to improve their job performance, they aren’t going to bother to improve, not for any amount of collective bargaining. I don’t think the teachers should get more money and benefits than engineers, no matter what the folks in the debate seem to think.
Throw money into a school system and you’ll see that it doesn’t go into computers and books. I’m not sure where it goes. New lights for the football field maybe?
No Child Left Behind? Hasn’t the major result of that been an increase in the dropout rate? “Get out, kid, you’re screwing up the numbers.”
The question about honesty was good. The Dems have to issue a blanket statement that they all voted to go into Iraq because the folks in the White House are evil. That way individual Democratic politicians won’t have to waste time explaining their vote when they should have been saying, “If I’m dishonest and I get caught, I’ll be in deep doo-doo. So I have to be honest.” Face it, the occasional transgression is forgivable. Lying about it is perjury.
As for honesty, with his Grecian Formula hair how can Kucinich pretend to be honest?
Did anyone else notice the fly in Dodd’s hair during his last answer?
Edward’s hair was perfect as always.
Hillary has porked out a bit. She could use some time away from the desk. A darker suit would hide it better until she’s president and has her own private gym.
Ok, ok, that was catty. I think Clinton would have done better to say, “What he said” when she spoke after Obama instead of taking time to paraphrase him. That way maybe she could have told us something we don’t already know. I think Clinton has some great ideas. If only she’d tell us how she can make them work. Maybe she doesn’t want the Republicans to steal her recipes?
The one thing these folks have to remember is that anything they say about one another now will be played as soundbites by the Republicans when Judgement Day, errrr, the Presidential Elections are at hand.
I feel as if the future of the world depends on the Dems playing this right.

The Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act

X-Originating-IP: [209.158.227.171]
From: RepGerber@pahouse.net
Reply-To: info@pahouse.net
Subject: Energy crisis demands action now
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:00:13 -0400

Energy crisis demands action now As the war in Iraq continues, energy and fuel costs rise and America’s energy consumption continues to cause climate change, the need for a cleaner and more energy-independent Pennsylvania is paramount. The Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act, as part of the House Democratic Caucus’s Energy Independence Strategy, would put Pennsylvania in the forefront of the alternative and renewable fuel economy. This legislation would mandate the blending of ethanol, soy and other clean energy sources in fuels. It would establish production and distribution standards to advance the shift to cleaner and cheaper domestic fuel sources. And it would help to stimulate the Pennsylvania economy with in-state production of renewable fuels. Our proposal is likely to come to a vote on the House floor next week and, if enacted into law, would put Pennsylvania on track to produce enough homegrown fuel to replace all the fuel we now import from the Persian Gulf. Clean the environment. End our dependence on foreign oil. Reduce fuel costs. Stimulate Pennsylvania’s economy. Show your support for this important legislation. Contact your representative and tell them to vote YES on House Bill 1202!

Spread the word!

I am utterly appalled by the ignorance of the present energy issues displayed in HOUSE BILL No.1202, otherwise known as the Clean Fuels and Energy Independence Act.

Perhaps the Pennsylvania representatives aren’t aware of the gas crisis in the early or mid-70s where the State of New Jersey had to go to even-odd day gas rationing.

Maybe the Pennsylvania representatives have forgotten the gas crisis in 1978 or 1979 during which lines at the gas station where up to a half mile long. Gas stations sold out their daily allotment by 10AM. People were shooting each other in gas lines in anger and frustration. Increased energy costs caused several years of stagflation, where prices and interest rates went up but salaries didn’t. The average Pennsylvanian’s life savings lost a large percentage of buying power, forcing retirees to go to back to work.

The problems inherent in relying not just on foreign oil but on fossil fuels in general are not new. Any rational, responsible individual opted a long time ago to forego luxuries such as comfort, style or the illusion of safety in favor of reduced emissions and better gas mileage.

Let’s be clear, also, that the United States buys most of its oil from friends and allies. Iraq was once a friend and ally, and continued oil revenue is essential to building a government to replace the one the United States destroyed. It would be wiser to stop buying oil from that notorious Wahabbi stronghold Saudi Arabia.

As it is written, HOUSE BILL No.1202 will have no effect on Pennsylvanians’ driving habits. The bill provides no incentive for individuals to use less gas or to pollute less. There is no mention of the paranoid trend towards larger vehicles that occurred after 9-11, as if the family car is a bomb shelter rather than simply a means of getting from point A to point B. There is also no mention of the windfall profits American oil refineries have made by basing manufacturing overhead allocations that did NOT increase on the increased cost of the raw material. The emphasis in HOUSE BILL No.1202 on biodiesel technology trivializes or ignores viable alternatives to the internal combustion engine, much less the development of proposed new alternative energy technologies. There is absolutely zero mention of the effect continued reliance on fossil fuels will have on carbon dioxide levels in the air we breathe. There is nothing the bill about addressing the soil depletion that will occur if current farming practices are continued while implementing biodiesel technology.

HOUSE BILL No.1202 is an short-sighted, agrarian solution to an industrial problem. In fact, the solutions outlined in HOUSE BILL No.1202 are exactly the solutions that high school ecology clubs were promoting in the ’70s. These solutions are so archaic that to implement the bill as written would be to set energy policy back 30 years. The result of HOUSE BILL No.1202 will be to push Pennsylvania back into the the Dust Bowl era. A post-modern technological solution that addresses multiple social, financial and geopolitical facets of the energy problem makes far more sense to any reasonably intelligent Pennsylvanian.

Iraq Pennsylvania Persian Gulf climate change energy crisis

Mental Health Care Failing At-Risk Troops, Related Study Finds Battlefield Ethics Also Suffering - CBS News

This story on CBS shows an ongoing problem in Iraq. Overworked, stressed-out soldiers start to fall apart due to long deployments and irrational (if any) strategy. I question labeling someone as mentally ill when it’s due to long-term stress.

Think about it. You get sent to the Middle East on a six-month deployment. 18 months later they still won’t let you go home. Your kids think you lied when you said you’d be home in six months - and again when you said you’d be home in a year - and are showing behavioral problems in school; your mortgage is in arrears because you took a pay cut for what you thought would be only six months; if you owned a business it has long since failed; you’ve missed 18 months worth of family get-togethers; you have to climb over a half-dozen Jersey Barriers to get to your ratty, noisy little home-away-from-home. And every day you drive highly-paid civilian contractors up and down the road to the airport like a duck in a shooting gallery. You start to envy the ones who get to go home in a body bag.

You see no progress being made, and you no longer believe that your efforts can make a difference. It creates a lot of confusion.

And in frustration you start lashing out at people. This is not good. We are literally driving thousands of our best citizens insane with our irrational policy and complete lack of strategy for rebuilding the country we tore apart. For someone with a degree in History, Bush seems incapable of learning from the mistakes of the past. Perhaps he was AWOL for history class, too.

I would like to remind everyone that we are not at war over there. Bush declared that the war was over years ago. Let’s get the other Islamic countries involved at the political level - their citizens are already in there helping the “insurgency,” as we like to call their freedom fighters. Whether you like Iran or not, they have what passes in the Middle East as a Democracy. So does Turkey. You’d have to get all kinds of agreements to stop the sectarian violence, but we knew that before we started this whole thing.

Technorati: Bush civilian+contractors Democracy freedom+fighters insurgency Iran Iraq Islamic stress mentally+ill Middle+East politics sectarian+violence

From CNN Report: Mentally ill troops forced into combat

The paper reported that some service members who committed [tag]suicide[/tag] in 2004 or 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed [tag]antidepressants[/tag] with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for “extended deployments.”

I believe it’s been like that in most wars. Has our culture stopped evolving? Certainly a large block of Americans, most of whom voted for Bush, fight [tag]evolution[/tag] tooth and nail. I guess fear of change goes very deep in some folks.

I seem to recall an interview with a fellow who was a doctor in WWII. He told about how when soldiers came in [tag]shell-shocked[/tag] (severely traumatized), they’d keep them in the field hospital, dope them into oblivion for a period of time to let the worst of it pass, then take them off the drugs and send them right back out to their unit. I forget how long they kept them, just a few days I think. The doctor was pretty sure that these poor fellows were going to be completely unable to take care of themselves, much less engage in [tag]combat[/tag]. He was pretty sure he was sending them back to die. It seemed that it had been haunting him for the last 50 years. You can bet that this war isn’t going to haunt [tag]Bush[/tag] and Rummy, not even for a minute.
In WWII we were facing an aggressor who had already swept across Europe. He had a face, Hitler’s face. And we didn’t go in until every friend of ours except Britain had fallen. What is our symbol in this war? [tag]Saddam Hussein[/tag]? Hey, we got him. [tag]Osama Bin Laden[/tag]? We aren’t even *looking* for him any more. The World Trade Center and its 3000 deaths? Iraq had nothing to do with that - it was perpetrated by Saudis protesting our continued presence in Saudi Arabia. What the hell *is* this war about?
The aggressor is just beginning to sweep across the Middle East. It’s not clear to our soldiers who they are fighting. Many of them feel as if they are little more than bodyguards for civilian contractors. They drive [tag]Halliburton[/tag] employees and other civilians back and forth from the green zone to the airport through a well-established corridor, like ducks in a shooting gallery. And in between trips they sit in tents in a big maze of Jersey barriers waiting for one of the locals to slip in and set off a bomb.
The word that the suicide rate is high in this war came out a couple of years ago. Every war has suicides. Yes, even The Big One, WWII. But when you are supporting the war, as just about everyone did during WWII, suicides make bad press so you don’t cover them. You want to show newsreels of Axis bombs and dead foreign children, not films of [tag]mentally ill[/tag] American soldiers - hardly more than children themselves - committing suicide.
One interesting difference in this war is that at the beginning of the war, if you check the numbers, the casualties were mostly older people with families and well-paid jobs back home. These are folks whose lives back home are being systematically disassembled by their extended absence. You join the Army Reserves with the understanding that you will serve as a stop-gap until the [tag]military[/tag] can muster and train enough recruits to step in, maybe six months and certainly not two years. You join the National Guard with the understanding that your job is to protect the people here at home in during emergencies. Something got really screwed up here.
Oh, this is a good line. This fellow makes it sound as if every soldier is a time bomb waiting to go off.

“Ritchie insisted the military works hard to prevent suicides, but it is a challenge because every soldier has access to a weapon.”

I lost count. Have we killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein yet?

But I digress… the war in Iraq isn’t a desperate struggle against a madman with intentions of [tag]World Domination[/tag]: quite the contrary. From the beginning we haven’t even attempted to be sure to have enough [tag]men and materiel[/tag] to successfully complete our mission against this most [tag]nebulous enemy[/tag], Terror, either.
Finally, and most importantly, in the 21st century you’d think that our species would be sensitive to each other’s psychological needs. When did we lose our ability to empathize? We have taken huge steps back in so many areas - [tag]environment[/tag], new energy sources, “Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights… it’s all wrong” - and I want to know why this is.
Who are these people who want to ignore the hard lessons of the last 60 years and go back to an idyllic past that never was?
I think it’s time for me to read up on exactly what this [tag]NeoCon[/tag] movement is about.

[Lyric above is from [tag]Gil Scott Heron[/tag]’s excellent invective against Ronald Reagan, B Movie, from his 1981 album Reflections.]

<RANT>
I am not swayed by vague, impassioned arguments. If I was, I’d be a Republican. The reason the Republicans are stomping us is this:
They put huge amounts of money into the infrastructure of the party. Think tanks, framing the arguments. The Democrats don’t invest, they throw money away. The tone of the latest JohnKerry.com email was just plain dumb. It is far below Kerry’s intellectual capabilities and I’m getting rather tired of his ineffectual stumping.
PLEASE, get a backbone. Be proactive: as long as you are reactive you don’t have a good enough foothold to argue your point. We have to be proactive participants in the Democratic process, not reactive little paramecia.
Listening to Kerry trying to be politically correct during the debates was painful. Stop trying so hard not to offend anyone. Progressives’ morality on the abortion issue is about the QUALITY of life vs. the inhumane exercise of bringing unwanted children into the world. “Pro-life” indeed! My morality is far more valid than theirs, yet Kerry fumbled for words during the debate sounded as if he is ashamed of his beliefs. As if any woman *wants* to abort her children. Nobody *wants* an abortion.
Life is an evolutionary continuum, not a series of separate creations. An early first-trimester fetus looks like a prawn and though the potential for human life is there, it is not sentient life. Not yet.
I saw Kerry on one of the Sunday morning political shows recently. The guy is still campaigning, still stumping. He is capable of so much more. How about some well-thought-out, *deep* insights from him for once.
And don’t let them call you “elite” just because you are educated. Bush has the same education as Kerry, but apparently he has chosen not to use it.
Republicans can give quick, definitive answers because they have already reduced the issues to black-and-white, with immutable, inhumane answers. They don’t have to stop and think. We think things through so it looks as if we are weak and indecisive.
And stop giving away money to people who don’t deserve it. Invest your money in the future instead. Put money into job training and childcare. Don’t put money into encouraging impoverished women to have more illegitimate babies. Many of these women are teens who don’t have access to the information that would have prevented the pregnancy. Teach birth control in the schools. Make the boy’s parents pay for the baby’s support - don’t encourage teens to have babies by offering them cash incentives to do so. If they get older they keep having them, offer them cash incentives to get free sterilizations instead.
Let’s make it really clear that white women have illegitimate kids,too, it’s not just a minority problem.
Tell everyone with an SUV that they aren’t safe from terrorists in their big metal womb. Each week your SUV uses enough gas to run my Prius for a two weeks or more. Get over 9-11, even if it requires psychiatric intervention. Especially if it requires psychiatric intervention. Don’t trade your freedom for a false sense of security. And PLEASE, the attacks on 9-11 were by Saudis, not by Iraqis and not by the Taliban. Our unprovoked attack on Iraq was and still is an obscenity. The war in Iraq is about the oil interests of all the people in the White House. Karl Rove acts like an evil wraith, Cheney acts like a sociopath, and Bush acts as if he is cognitively impaired from years of alcohol abuse.
And I act as if there is still a place in America for Democrats and other Progressives.
</RANT>

In the grand American tradition of kicking them while they’re down, President Bush made a Proclamation last week that suspends the minimum wage laws for workers in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. Hell of a thing to do to people who have lost everything and want to rebuild. Here it is, right from the horse’s mouth, Whitehouse.gov.
Proclamation by the President: To Suspend Subchapter IV of Chapter 31 of Title 40, United States Code, Within a Limited Geographic Area in Response to the National Emergency Caused by Hurricane Katrina
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050908-5.html
Bush is even extending the Emergency Declaration to many states that took in refugees. Like New Jersey???
President Approves Emergency Declaration For New Jersey
http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=19001

Here is a list of the five major companies getting contracts in the area.
FEMA Contracts to Provide Housing Relief for Displaced Hurricane Victims
http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=18708
These companies already have found windfalls in government contracts. There is no need to take money from the wage earners at the bottom of the corporate pyramid. They also have lucrative contracts in Iraq. Our Army protects their civilian contractors, oil workers, at public expense.

The former head of FEMA, Joe Allbaugh, is or has been a lobbyist both for the Shaw Group and for Halliburton.
Former FEMA Chief Is at Work on Gulf Coast: Lobbyist Allbaugh Gives Clients Help
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090702385.html
You know Halliburton, that’s the company that is being investigated for overcharging us, the taxpayers, in Iraq.
Halliburton Overcharge Not Deliberate, Zakheim Says

Halliburton’s KBR unit, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, has been paid $866 million on the oil reconstruction contract and “$61 million is actually the only part that is being questioned,” Zakheim said.

http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/2003/article_121703.jsp

In an unrelated story, our Vice President was still on the Halliburton payroll in 2001. To his credit, he used all of his stock options in 2000 so that he could sell the stock to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Vice President and Mrs. Cheney Release 2000 Income Tax Return

Included in the wage and salary income reported on the tax return is $806,332 in salary and $4,333,500 in deferred compensation and bonuses from Halliburton Company, where Mr. Cheney served as chief executive officer until he resigned on August 16, 2000. As previously reported in Halliburton’s proxy statement, Mr. Cheney received a cash bonus of $1,451,398 from Halliburton in January of this year, which will be included in the 2001 tax return.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/04/20010413-5.html

Well, the news is full of fun stuff today. The press could do so much good if they directed their energy into improving the world.
Man faints, dies after seeing epidural. Ok, I can almost see this. The needle is three inches long and marked in stripes to indicate depth of penetration. It looks kind of like a skeeter’s tweeter.
US reporter jailed in CIA trial. This one is tricky. Background: Joseph Wilson was confronting Dubya over the questionable evidence he had presented to justify the rape of Iraq. To retaliate, someone told a NY Times reporter that his wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA agent. Nobody knows how many people have died because she was outed - she was in a sensitive overseas post. Furthermore, the reporter who is being jailed, Judith Miller, doesn’t even know who the leak was! The issue here is whether the press has the right to keep sources confidential.
G8 calls for new climate dialogue. There are only 5 people left in the world who don’t accept the awful fact of global warming. All of them are in the White House.
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Christian Doc Speculates Why Americans Rank #1 in Mental Illness. Have you talked to God today, Ma’am? He can save your sanity.
Drug Kingpin investigated for “doctor shopping”.
Ah, here we go… Mars picture of the day.
Soccer moms on dope. “We don’t see families torn apart. We don’t see the violence. We don’t see the robberies and the burglaries,” he said. “Meth is definitely worse on society than ( marijuana ).” Huh?
Ever wonder why we went after Iraq when so many of the 9-11 highjackers were Saudis? Here’s a profile of the gentleman that Dubya knows as Uncle Bandar.
Armor Plate your iPod. Clever devils, those Japanese.
This one’s from MemeMachineGo! It’s about the recent eminent domain decision by the Supreme Court. The one that allows your town to bulldoze your home if they can increase their tax revenue by giving the land to someone else.

Technorati: Joseph+Wilson Dubya Iraq Valerie+Plame Judith+Miller Mental+Illness Uncle+Bandar eminent+domain