Need a dictionary in three or four languages just to underswtand him.

Later.

Girl on a Tractor, by Joyce Sutphen.

`

I knew the names of all the cows before I knew my alphabet, but no matter the subject; I had a mastery of it, and when it came to help in the fields, I learned to drive a tractor at just the right speed, so that two men, walking on either side of the moving wagon could each lift a bale, walk towards the steadily arriving platform and simultaneously hoist the hay onto the rack, walk to the bale, lift, turn, and find me there, exactly where I should be, my hang on the throttle, carefully measuring out the pace.

William and I have always been on the right side and that gauls the hell out of some of you.

Pardon his French.

.

did Hoyer actually say that?

..."neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November"

.

where would he draw the line? abortion?

just bizarre

marc

I've driven that tractor just "so." And, stood on that moving platform to snatch those bales with my hay hooks and stack them just "so." And, thrilled to a frozen wet washcloth kept in the cooler to savor during the breaks. Haying can be very hard work. But, no Nautilus machine has ever developed my lats and traps like haying has done. Too bad I had to get older. I miss it. Thanks for the memory. Our first cutting is down in tidy windrows ready for the baler. Hoping we stay dry for another day or two. Picking up those bales is all done by stack wagon now.

Saw Sen Dodd C-Span for a while on FISA.

Pretty good work, and intent. (Yeah, he stumbles in reading often...)

But he never spoke of any pre-9/11 illegal surveillance conduct.

Is he unaware of such?

Or, has it not been much reported or known?

Did it occur or not?

If confirmable, it's another good nail on the wall of defame.

Boxer, as i somewhere earlier noted, was also good vs FISA flop and coastal/arctic oil drilling greed grab shroud swindle gouge ploy patter.

Anybody know what the score is in the Senate now to hold off or rightly amend the FISA fold?

Truth has no special time of its own,

It's hour is now---always. Albert Schweitzer.

You know, the guy you all come here to read?

No matter how many times he explains "it," "it" just doesn't sink in. I've suggested he must explain "it" again and again in every post but I suspect even he gets tired of doing that. How many times must you repeat the blatantly obvious?

That's what I meant about the political "outrage of the day" junkies. They are easy to spot. They are always "swearing something off" like that will solve all their problems. As if any particular party affiliation was like a substance they were addicted to. They call that substituting one addiction for another. If I do "Independent" or "Libertarian" it will all be better! Yeah, right. Wrong. You'll just get another variety of outrage. All political parties are power distribution networks. They acquire and distribute political power. That's it. If that drug analogy is accurate, at least the D party actually has a chance of getting you your "fix" cheap, and regularly. It may not always be pure, but it never is.

I'm really tired of repeating myself. Let Glenn do it. He gets paid for it, probably not enough but at least he gets paid.

From an article posted here on the right side:

Feds sued over alleged mining of immigrants data

By TOM HAYS Associated Press Writer

Jun 24th, 2008 | NEW YORK -- The U.S. government secretly gathered personal data on more than 130,000 immigrants in the run-up to the war in Iraq, according to a purported FBI document attached to a lawsuit filed Tuesday demanding more detail about how the information was gathered and used.

The New York Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit against the Justice Department alleges that federal authorities may have violated the privacy of the immigrants under a previously undisclosed FBI program the document refers to as "Operation Darkening Clouds."

The NYCLU sued after the FBI rejected a Freedom of Information Act request last year to disclose more details about the program. The civil rights group says the FBI replied that "it neither confirms nor denies the existence of the activity or records concerning this subject."

The alleged data-mining efforts "run counter to our core American values by unfairly singling out immigrants and making them targets of suspicion and scrutiny," Donna Lieberman, NYCLU executive director, said in a statement.

The FBI and the Justice Department had no immediate comment.

The suit filed in federal court in Manhattan says the document — titled "U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services/Fraud Detection and National Security Unit Automated Systems" — was originally obtained last year under an earlier Freedom of Information demand by Yale Law School students. The students sought the information for a project examining the government's data-mining of computer records as an investigative tool since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The five-page document describes the benefits of background checks by the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security, a Homeland Security offshoot formed in 2003 to fight immigration fraud. It concludes with a brief reference to the immigrant database.

"During the pre-invasion of Iraq, FDNS personnel pulled together over 130,000 immigration records which were the cornerstone of Operation Darkening Clouds (FBI) and Operation Liberty Shield (DHS)," it says.

Liberty Shield was unveiled by the White House in 2003 as a "comprehensive national plan" by the Department of Homeland Security to tighten borders and disrupt terror plots.

Without detailing "Operation Darkening Cloud," the document contained in the NYCLU suit describes how "immigration information and systems" aided federal investigations.

In one instance, it said, a "sweep of immigration databases" turned up the names of foreign students at Midwest universities suspected of changing their majors to science at the request of an unnamed country that wanted to draft them for a prohibited nuclear arms program.

It says the information "resulted in a successful pitch of two of those students to assist the U.S. government in exchange for permanent resident alien status."

———

Associated Press writer Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this report.

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/us/2008/06/24/D91GQA8G0_immigrant_data_lawsuit/index.html

And hey, rat out your friends and get 'residency status'?