That 'life is mostly pain'.

Which struck me strange, as a child.

My Father asked: 'What is the 1 thing that all men will fight for'?

And gave the answer: 'Freedom.'

As i listen to the Pakistanis i know, one shared wish repeats:

That USA money, meddling, and muddling stop screwing up their Country.

As i see what mismanagement here results in currently, i agree with them completely.

It's time to plan a March On Washington again.

Next Spring, early May, perhaps.

We must have national voice in the policies and implementation of our government.

Crisis after crisis besets us and our world neighbors partly, and sometimes, wholely due to American interventions and inactions that harm them and us, with only late January as a flickering candle in the malevolent maelstrom so far unended.

As far as Accountability, the echo can be of John Paul Jones:

We have not yet begun to fight!

Again, trying to see what wisdom is out there on Feingold's comments on MSNBC yesterday. I couldn't find a transcript, but Feingold basically intimated about the possibility of Obama addressing FISA when he's president (though he was very critical of Obama's vote). I'm certainly not syaing I think so, but for Feingold to come out and repeat this trope that's proppping up a lot of the Obama worship out there, seemed significant....any thoughts anyone, I'm curious as to what others think about this.

Play chess in jail. be phobic at shadows, flowers, cheerleaders with short frilled skirts.

Be careful in prisons if you decide to bend down to retrieve a dropped penny. No have a forced jail tattoo `fiance.

None are perfect.

C and D's are okay.

If a orphaned piglet?

O Winnie the Pooh?

a piglet may suck?

Lives off a cow utter.

No, I do not know that. Our ancestors may have done so, way back when. I think a representative republic would be a good idea; but we would need something like a constitution to protect the poor, weak, and powerless among us.

The fiction that was sold to you in civics class is just a myth for the young. The "outer mysteries" as some paths would call them. The "inner truths" are much darker, and scarier than John Obama is.

Read the bio dufus. Glenn is a constitutional lawyer.

Oops - I mean if you can. Otherwise have your mommy do it for you.

Well done. Glad someone was carring on in my absence. :-)

Cheers,

Oh.. $1000? That's why she voted nay for cloture.

1) You cannot write in a candidate for president

Yes you can, and Nader ran a write-in campaign in 1992. You could have checked this is one minute. I have no idea where you got this idea.

2) Voting for a “spoiler candidate” does not amount to voting for McCain. By your reasoning it is equivalent to not voting at all (Obama does not get one vote, neither does McCain- difference in McCain-Obama totals as a result of voting ‘spoiler’ instead of Obama = 1). Voting for McCain is equivalent to voting for McCain (difference in vote totals as a result of voting McCain instead of Obama = 2).

This is technically true, but since either Obama or McCain will be the winner in every state, what matters is the difference between McCain and Obama. One less vote for Obama is relatively one more vote for McCain.

It is, of course, true that voting for McCain is even more harmful, but mere failure to vote against him effectively also helps him.

3) I think your donkey-elephant analogy is flawed. As far as I can tell, the donkey and the elephant are both pulling in the same direction. The donkey just pulls a little slower. In this model, your desire to “limit Republican damage” is a desire to pull the band-aid off slowly.

I think it's ludicrous to suggest that the Democrats "pull in the same direction" on the environment, gay rights, the minimum wage, women's rights, etc, etc, etc. The mere fact that Al Gore would never have come up with the idea of invading Iraq makes it wrong to say that they "pull in the same direction".

But what if they did? You admit that the donkey at least pulls in a bad direction more slowly. So if those are your two choices, and right now they are, if you want to stop the elephant, the conclusion is obvious.

This statement cannot be logical -

"The Democratic congress does a poor job of standing up to bad Republican presidents. Therefore I will enable the election of another bad Republican president".

Nothing can make it logical.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25623907/

or click on sig.

Significant excerpt:

MADDOW: It was stunning enough to see a Congress argue for its own impotence, in favor of an all-powerful presidency when that argument was coming from the Republicans. But with this vote, I think that voters have to be asking, if there‘s any meaningful difference between the parties on executive power, between the Democratic vision of executive power and the GOP‘s, certainly your vision of executive power is different from the president‘s, but can you say the same for your party?

FEINGOLD: I‘m very concerned about it. People have a great deal of right to be disappointed and to look at the 2006 election both with regard to Iraq and say, “What are they doing?”

But, you know what, Rachel? Having a Democratic president, in particular, Barack Obama—should allow us to greatly change this mistake. Barack Obama believes in the Constitution. He‘s a constitutional scholar. I believe that he will have a better chance to look at these powers that have been given to the executive branch and even though he‘ll be running the executive branch, I think he will understand and help take the lead in fixing some of the worst provisions.

So, this isn‘t [sic] a huge setback and it would have been much better for Democrats to stand together and not let it happen in the first place because it‘s much harder to change it after the fact. But I do believe that Barack Obama is well-positioned, both in terms of his knowledge and his background and his beliefs to correct this.

And so, I do think that the people have a right to be disappointed, but they also have a right to hope for change on this issue, in particular, starting in January.

MADDOW: It is heartening to hear your optimism on the prospect of Obama‘s presidency on this issue, but, of course, his vote today let a lot of us who see this as a real abrogation of the Fourth Amendment to be very concern.

FEINGOLD: No, it was a wrong vote. And any Democrat that voted that way was not voting according to what the people in the Democratic Party clearly want, but, you know, we‘ll pull together after the election and we‘ll lay the case out again. This is what this process did, I think, in the last few months. We made it much more clear to the American people about the invasion of their privacy and their rights that‘s occurring.

And as people take a closer look at it, when we don‘t have a president who believes in this crazy notion of executive power, we have a Democrat House and Senate, we may actually be able to fix this and I‘m not optimistic about it being done right any time in the near future, but I do have good feelings about the potential to do it starting next year.