...not enough time earlier today to keep up.

A couple of thoughts, though.

"If we could democratize that kind of poetic ability..." --ondelette

My first reaction was that it could never happen with the current state of Reality TeeVee, but then I thought that maybe Reality TV would be the one way to democratize, if not the poetic ability itself, at least an appreciation for it. [Needs a treatment.]

The rest will have to wait for tomorrow, but as an aside, I did see a post by Marty Kaplan at Huffington today, comparing Oprah with Cronkite, which seems ridiculous on its face, but the analogy actually made some sense... in the context of comparing Iraq to Vietnam, and the impact they each (Cronkite & Oprah) had-- or could have-- on the public debate.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/oprah-is-to-iraq-as-cronk_b_75968.html

And when I went to retrieve that link, I found another one citing researchers who say that evolution is speeding up:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20071210/evolution-speedup/

I'll have to finish up here tomorrow... but keep up the good work, everyone. My education continues, too.

"It's a feature, not a bug." - Digby, on the undercovered pattern of private military contractors (e.g., Halliburton/KBR, DynCorp, etc.) raping women, whether their own civilian employees, or the civilians (e.g., very young girls) in the countries where they are working.

It's not like we didn't know ahead of time that the "contractor thing" was a very bad idea. I posted about that DynCorp case back in April of 2003. And the issue then, as now, was the fact that private military contractors don't fall under any legal jurisdiction.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

I think it is all of a piece with the whole torture mindset, not to mention thinking one is licensed to shoot and kill innocent civilians wholesale.

And, yet, there is actually a battle going on in a small California town about whether to allow Blackwater to build a training ground for law enforcement personnel. No matter the desperate need for economic development, shouldn't that one be a complete no-brainer? Apparently, not if the human beings who will eventually become the victims of such schemes are mere commodities.

From the NYTimes via Huffington Post: http://tinyurl.com/2galo4

Digby's pithy statement should be part of a T-shirt campaign to defeat the Paw, the caption to an image of a raping & pillaging: "It's a feature, not a bug." Put them on a group of young women and girls for a counter-photo-opp.

A few years ago, we woke early one Sunday to the most godawful screeching sound you could imagine on a Sunday morning. It sounded like some kind of unearthly scream, but it was actually the sound that a healthy, full-grown tree (I don't remember what kind, but more ordinary, probably than yours) makes when being cut down with power tools.

It was just a few doors up the street from us. Later on we found out why it was destroyed. The owner was afraid of storm damage-- that the tree would be a casualty in some storm and take out his roof. Unbelievable.

And we live in a very tree-friendly borough. In fact, an old Sycamore that's at least 300 years old (maybe 350) was rescued by the borough and a group of concerned citizens when the owner of that property was planning to sell it, including the house that was too close to the tree and dwarfed by it. The property is now a small community park sheltered by that magnificent tree. And the house is gone.

I remember a comment thread some time back when she was attacked by many people for/on this same topic.

It's worth remembering that whenever we take offense-- especially where none is meant-- that we only escalate.

At the time, I could sense that Beth was trying to make a point similar to the one that Glenn makes in this post, but she did not have the same resources to cite at her fingertips. I had even less to offer in support. But her intuitive searching was very compelling.

It is a strange paradox that such a fringe element of what is referred to as the Jewish community (despite its many and varied factions) has so much sway over our foreign policy. And at the expense of our own domestic policy. That was the point I thought Beth was trying to make then, and overlaps with Glenn's in this post.

What I appreciate most about these comment threads (not the attacks, that's for sure!) is when we help each other sort out areas of confusion or those where we fail to communicate effectively (especially given the nature of online communication) and we all come out the wiser for it, having been all over the net reading one another's links, and incorporated arguments that are better written and thought-out than our own. That is when this place sings. And that is when I hope our lurkers are the real influencers in the public sphere and that they leave here more finely tuned, too. That is when those politicians and political operators and handlers and journalists (?) get to see us acting in good faith. And it's priceless.

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Pedinska... I never did catch up with the rest of the comments on that earlier thread. Sorry to hear about your "weather," but hope you are much better.