It is raining gently. When I see the sunlight, I often remember the Asian peasants who tended the land. I see the Lady rice planters, and young women harvesting, and bringing in the sheathes with radiant smiles.

I hear those happy field heh giggles.

I see gleams lit of eyesight's wondering,

And rural peasants did ask this question:

'Why did American parents send sons/daughters',

10,000 miles from their homeland to die so alone,

in the 'Nam's rural peasant Motherland?' I say, 'I am not sure why?'

`

And the dead complexion is reddish, and quickly turns pale.

The dead flayed fall still, and remain so silently but, they contained a sacred secret then in wartime. I gesture with my hand when one expressed such wonder? It's always difficult to expound.

Those sad war-eyes I still can see. When it rains like today,

I see the hate, and potential war that may return to the domestic 'homeland' ...O, Maria. I am sorry too. And mercy on those who kill for dirty filthy lucre? I think it's about time I take a lukewarm bath and quit 'comment letter' writing so darn much. It's aggravation and some days it's too irritating even for me...

Good luck with your disaster recovery in Tennessee. They were reporting on it on the channel we were watching for election coverage last night, tornadoes were shutting down the local stations off and on.

Scene safety, and come back and share your opinions with us when you are done.

The ONLY terrorist I'm afraid of is mother nature.

I'm ready for spring.

NO MORE SNOW!!

Everything else is just invented bullshit by the administration which is hoarding the cranial air supply.

First, my thoughts and prayers to the victims of yesterday's tornadoes. In early February! How tragic and bizarre. Having grown up in NYC, I experienced what weather was like beyond the coast when I went on an extended cross-country drive some 15 years ago during mid to late summer, the peak of storm season (back then). I was lucky enough to avoid anything too adverse, but the endless electrical storms and news warnings were quite frightening (especially since I did a fair amount of hiking along the way out in the open).

Wasn't yesterday's turnout incredible, and very encouraging in terms of voters' desire to do away with the status quo? Whether they voted for H or B, people who voted for Dems greatly outnumbered GOP voters. Their reasons might be varied, but clearly there's a great desire for big change in DC in the land, and that is good for Dems, and bad for Pubs. We're probably going to pick up 15-20 house seats (or more), and 4-7 senate seats (or more?), and most likely the presidency. No guarantees, and even if this happens, who knows how bold Dems will be in doing right. Still, movement in the right (er, left) direction.

Orin Hatch just bloviating (i.e. lying) on the floor of the senate about how if we allow congress and the courts oversight over intelligence collection, we will all die. How this sack of putrid moral goo gets up every morning and looks himself in the mirror without vomiting is beyond me. He makes a living basically shilling for right-wing corporate authoritarianism that would shred the constitution into confetti, and appears to totally believe in it. How anyone so hugely insecure, so dishonest, so contemptuous of democracy and corrupt in heart and mind and soul, can rise to a position of such power and "respect" is something that I will never understand.

Rockefeller got up and basically said "ditto". Now it's Bond's turn. Man are there some seriously stupid voters in this country to repeatedly elect such cretinous traitors. Oh, but they're for "family values" (until they're caught with live boys and dead girls), so I give they're a-ok.

Perhaps, just perhaps, yesterday's turnout is a sign that voters are finally waking up to reality, however dimly, and getting ready to do some serious house cleaning. In the senate too.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

-H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

Yes.

O. O. Hatch is a little bit trite?

O , O.H. is right about we all will die.

Whoever buries 'ole O.H. gets buried too...

And that will happen...Ya's are guaranteed.

The only thing NSA can be doing is link analysis. Who is communicating with whom.

With access to the actual data stream, much more is possible. It is purely a practical problem in information analysis. You do as much as you can, and that is a lot more than you could do in the past. Link analysis first become possible how many computer generations ago?

"The funding has been just awful, the worst I've ever seen in my twenty years in the military," says Dr. Katherine Scheirman, a retired Air Force colonel who served as chief of medical operations in the Air Force's European headquarters from July 2004 to September 2006. Scheirman says the current political environment has made it 'impossible' to give wounded soldiers proper care. 'It's all about money,' she says. 'Every kid who that gets kicked out with PTSD is gonna be a lifetime of disability payments for the government. Every kid who gives up and kills himself, nothing.' Scheirman's unit was in charge of evacuating the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan and transporting them to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and on to the United States. She says politics infused every aspect of care. When she tried to beef up the hospital staff at Landstuhl, she was told, 'No, we can't put more doctors or nurses in there because it will look like we expect more casualties.' She was not allowed to send the visibly wounded home on commercial planes. 'The rule,' she says, 'was they couldn't fly commercial if they had injuries that showed because it would upset the American people.' The military planes were so cold the Air Force ended up running clothing drives for hats, scarves and mittens - a situation that continues today. In one e-mail requesting donations, a lieutenant colonel wrote, 'Mittens are preferred because they often fit better over wounded hands/fingers.'

'What kind of Army doesn't provide mittens for its wounded soldiers?' Scheirman asks, 'What's sad is this isn't the way it's ever been before. I came into the military under Reagan, and George Bush's dad - they treated people well. The Clintons treated people really, really well. It's only this Administration that acts like the lives of these soldiers are expendable.' "

... from "Denial in the Corps"

--- By Kathy Dobie

--- The Nation, 2/18/08