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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
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But you cuss, call people coward, and your nasty.
Change your life. You are drinking Jim Beam whiskey?
Wild Turkey? Maybe you fell off a gymnast balance beam.
Have a podiatrist, or a Rabbi proctologist, examine foul mouth.
I said this 200 posts ago But it was deleted by the fuckwits who run this trash heap.
Man, you carry a lot of rage. I doubt you'll live long at this rate.
http://youtube.com?v=-5U0-iO9rjM
The adoration of the Magi, from Pasolini's "Il Vangelo secondo Matteo" (The Gospel According to St. Matthew)
Soundtrack by Odetta.
Long ago, at Carnegie Hall. I heard Odetta.
Now we have memories.
And youtube
That's nice. Thanks.
Retzilian--it's nice to have a face to go with a screen name.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: you're skill at finding appropriate links is beyond amazing. I'd present you with an award if I could find one, but you'd find it first.
Greenwald does a masterful job of describing the inbred, incestuous nature of the D.C. Establishment.
Career political hacks gravitate to Congress the way flies gravitate to shit. After hanging in Congress for years (or decades!), some of them are not averse to helping their little boys and girls succeed them. That way, they, too, can make a career of living on the taxpayers' dime. (I never knew that Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was appointed to the Senate by HER OLD MAN. I hope Sarah Palin challenges her in 2010, and whips her ass.)
The neocons? What a bunch of inbreds! You've got Big Podhoretz and Little Podhoretz, Big Goldberg and Little Goldberg, Big Kristol and Little Kristol, blah blah blah. It guarantees chickenhawk warmongering and moral depravity.
The D.C. Establishment is full of shit. A good enema should do the trick.
Andy Worthington, author and journalist, writes on the horror at Guantánamo. In a recent piece he writes one hell of an article about what closing it might mean.
... With no concrete plans announced by the President-Elect’s transition team, pundits and off-the-record officials of all political hues have stepped in to fill the void with speculation about the significance of the remaining 255 prisoners, some shrill demands for legislation endorsing “preventive detention,” some equally shrill warnings that robust techniques will be needed in future to deal with captured terrorists, and a range of opinions about whether the Guantánamo prisoners regarded as a genuine threat to the United States (estimates range from several dozen prisoners to around 80) should be transferred to the US mainland to face trials in federal courts or in another brand-new system.
Some of these opinions are genuinely troubling, and reveal the extent to which the government’s fear-filled “War on Terror” rhetoric of the last seven years has permeated the US psyche. Proposals to create new legislation authorizing “preventive detention,” for example, actually seek to justify much of what the Bush administration has been doing at Guantánamo, and it beggars belief that citizens in a civilized society founded on the rule of law could attempt to justify imprisoning people not for what they have done, but to prevent what they could conceivably do in future.
The proposal is doubly disturbing because the government’s assertions that some of the prisoners may be dangerous comes not from evidence that can be tested in a court of law, but from intelligence reports that may or may not be reliable, and from hearsay and confessions — made by other prisoners, or by the prisoners themselves — that may have been produced through the use of torture or other forms of coercion, or through bribery (a well-chronicled “rewards” system for prisoners regarded as “cooperative”). ...
click sig for more.
I recommend anyone interested in the rule of law read this. This guy knows his stuff. Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press, and available from Amazon).
I'm sure someone's already pointed this out, but to be fair it would be hard for a political campaign not to be "incestuous" in Delaware. It's a small state where 98% of the potential candidates (let's be serious - you have to be connected to be elected in the US, as elsewhere) went to high school with one another somewhere in New Castle county, or are related by virtue of birth, marriage or having dated someone's parent or sibling. You couldn't be nominated and anonymous the way you could if you were, say, a senatorial candidate from San Diego campaigning in Redding.
As a rabid genealogist, I can tell you that I have traced many, many family lines that go back to very prominent, powerful and wealthy families and as each descendant comes forward, there is a definite trend of diminishing returns after these highly accomplished people. Only too many families with wealth, power and privilege raise children with lesser talents, less self-control, no work ethic, etc. With each successive generation, the family becomes poorer and more obscure until they are shoeless hillbillies who have to start at the bottom again (no offense to those of us who are shoeless hillbillies). I have seen this trend over and over as I trace people's families. I do not often see the trend in reverse, but presumably it happens somewhere over hundreds of years. Remember, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.
Dan Lipinski is a particularly bad example of Illinois nepotism. He had been working as a college professor in another state before he was anointed as his daddy's successor.
But we have many such examples here. Besides Jesse Jackson Jr, there's Sandi Jackson (Mrs Jesse Jr) who was elected to the Chicago City Council in 2007. She succeeds Darcel Beavers who had been appointed by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley after the 2006 November elections to succeed her father William Beavers, Jackson's rival.
Then there's Todd Stroger. His daddy, John Stroger, ran Cook County (population 5 million) as Board President for many years. In 2006 John Stroger suffered a severe stroke and was never seen in public again. Todd said his dad would return to office but no one outside the family was permitted to see or speak to him. Eventually, four days after the deadline for third-party candidates to file for the Board presidency race, John Stroger announced his resignation. Todd is now County Board President and has hired many other relatives. His earlier political office? Apppointed by Mayor Daley as alderman in 2001. He did once win an election, back in 1992.
And now there's Emil Jones, a power in the state senate for many years. Jones announced in August 2008 that he will retire in January 2009. Of who would replace him on the ballot, his spokesperson said, "His preference, yes, would be to see his son [Emil Jones III] serve," which has prompted criticism and been described as "anointing one of his children to take over for him." While accepting the nomination, Emil's son, Emil Jones III announced he would work diligently for the people of his district.
So the mayor is a son of a previous mayor, the county board president is a son of the previous one, most of the aldermen are children of earlier aldermen and almost all of them are controlled by the mayor, the governor is the son-in-law of a powerful alderman, and Dick Durbin has requested a pardon for the previous governor, jailed for corruption.
It's a cozy little group here. Well, except for the occasional family spats that affect public policy, but there's no time to go into that!
(Text above partly from Wikipedia, partly from personal recollections)
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
